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Are YOU still afraid to use online business intelligence tools? Why?
Many business owners are still leery of hosted services. Unfortunately on-premise business intelligence tools can be pricy to implement for small businesses. Are you still nervous about using hosted business intelligence tools? If so, why?
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2 Answers
Can you share some of those hosted BI solutions? Very interested.
Hi Richard.
To use the Bime software as an example - it is offered through the SaaS version or the desktop version. The benefits of the SaaS version is that SaaS vendors are only selling a service to the end user, meaning that they are 100% focused on end user experience. The new delivery and relationship model brings with it a number of advantages:
* SaaS removes limitations of what you can achieve using your in house IT hardware and support. All you need to do is work out what you want your software to do and how much you want to pay for it, then find the product that fits best
* Most SaaS products are lightweight and designed to complement the investment in data storage and manipulation that you already have. For example, our product, Bime, plugs directly in to online and traditional sources to extract data, then allows creation of visualizations and dashboards with a few clicks
* SaaS payment structures mean that you have no CapEx and only pay for the amount you use the product. If half your users find they they aren't deriving any value from the software, they can easily cancel their subscriptions at the end of the month, halving the cost
* Access and sharing were the original drivers of this cloud computing model so applications make it easy to get useful visualizations to the right people quickly by inviting people to your dashboard's URL or embedding it in a website or blog
* Finally, as there is no software to install, there is no daily maintenance or routine tasks to be done, so nothing to require extra IT hands or expertise. This frees IT professionals to concentrate on strategic IT and growing your business
It's suitable to BI because BI products have traditionally required huge upfront costs, had long lead times and demanded technical expertise to use. SaaS allows powerful functionality without the need for any of these. Bime can be up and running in minutes and is focused on being easy to use.
But what we really want to know is that despite the benefits of SaaS, whether people are still afraid to move to cloud based solutions.
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