Is there hosted business intelligence for SMBs?

Bill: I'm from Zoho and we have a hosted BI solution squarely targeting the SMBs. Take a look at Zoho Reports - http://reports.zoho.com.

SMBs have long used spreadsheets as their only BI tool. And that was because traditional BI solutions were out of reach for them. We want to change that with Zoho Reports. We have a free plan for 100,000 rows & 2 users. And our pricing starts from $15 per month.

Using Zoho Reports is easy. We offer a spreadsheet-like interface for interacting with the data. Reports can be created by drag-and-drop There are a lot many SMBs using our solution successfully. Some of our customers here - http://www.zoho.com/reports/Customers.html

www.acsellerate.net

I work for ECi, a business system software maker for mostly small click-and-mortar stores in several verticals. Our customers often use Acsellerate third party hosted services to mine their data with a proven record of ROI. One customer said, "The first account that we saved using the 'Sales Alert' has more than paid for the cost of the system."

For your reference,
http://www.ecisolutions.com/products/addons/acsellerate.htm

I absolutely affirm your question that BI can be as useful for SMBs.

Hi Bill,

There are top quality players who can sell you their portfolio.
My answer for your 1st question would be:
- have a look at the SAP BusinessObjects OnDemand or Edge portfolio. They provide for the SMB with according small prices.

My answer for your 2nd question would be:
- Absolutely! There is a new market so every company cvan take it's chance to grow and become an Enterprise.

You have to decide if you want to go for the large innovative vendors or for the small specialized ones.

Good luck and let me know if you want more info,
Patrick Sandriman

Hi Bill,

Of course there are BI for SMB. Business Intelligence is about how you see your business. It depends to the business needs. If you are an SMB but your business needs a lot of feature of BI, so you need to spare quite a lot of money. The BI would give you more than it is invested.

But if you are a very simple SMB, maybe you just need an open source BI and you just spend some money to implement it. But if the business is a very very simple one and you think it is not worth to spend money, just use your office tools like Excel or just use manual paper.

Not sure if you've had any luck with your search for a hosted BI site, but there is one currently in the design phase. It's called YobiOnline. We are in the licensing discussions with IBM Cognos and are slated to open our doors (so to speak) on Jan 1 2011. Cognos will be the infrastructure. Would you like more information? If you, please send me an e-mail and we can talk more.

Regards,

Darren

The need for a "business intelligence" solution applies to any business, regardless of size. All companies set goals that deal with revenue, customer satisfaction, market presence, profitability, cost cutting, etc., so visually presenting information is an extremely powerful tool in order to catch trends and continually ask if the business is moving closer to its target.
Drilling down into the detail data helps in finding out where actions must be taken to adjust course.
There are indeed hosted BI vendors aplenty. Make sure you select one that is targeted at small and midsize businesses, provides predefined applications, a tool to create custom applications and a straightforward pricing model.

Our ExisOne BI is available for use on either your owned computer(s) or on hosted service. It is a full featured BI solution for enterprises as well as medium to small businesses. All editions have identical features. Only limitation being that the Lite edition is limited to database size not exceeding 2GB. Please take a look at our website http://www.exisone.com. We have a live demo for you to try it out. ExisOne can be implemented in as little as one week. And, it is so intuitive that a user can learn to use it in minutes.

We Are Cloud are a French Business Intelligence company producing the SaaS BI application Bime. We started because business intelligence was mostly just too hard: too hard to use, too hard to manage, too hard to buy and too hard to get right. Bime delivers simple-to-use yet powerful BI, data visualization and dashboarding in a software-as-a-service application, making data analysis faster, easier and cheaper.

We think that our product is perfect for SMBs for a couple of reasons.

Bime addresses two previously unserviced business needs.

1) Small and medium-sized businesses often cannot justify the large CapEx of traditional BI, do not have the IT resources to run an on premise database and server system and are not sure that they have the breadth or depth of data to warrant such a system. Often their needs changed and evolved far faster than software could be developed and installed.

2) Traditional BI demands technical expertise both to manage and use. Business users could not quickly perform analysis themselves; queries had to be made through the IT department and often involved long delays.

As Bime is a SaaS application, we provide functionality to end users, not specifications to IT professionals. This means that Bime is centred on end-user experience and is constantly updated to incorporate user feedback and requests. Furthermore, Bime requires no upfront cost, no maintenance and no technical expertise, making it lightweight and scalable.

For more info, see http://businessintelligence.me

Atum provides solutions with small to medium sized businesses in mind, and offers partnership programs as well.

Take a look at their website to find out more http://www.atum.com

We Are Cloud are a French Business Intelligence company producing the SaaS BI application Bime. We started because business intelligence was mostly just too hard: too hard to use, too hard to manage, too hard to buy and too hard to get right. Bime delivers simple-to-use yet powerful BI, data visualization and dashboarding in a software-as-a-service application, making data analysis faster, easier and cheaper.

We think that our product is perfect for SMBs for a couple of reasons.

Bime addresses two previously unserviced business needs.

1) Small and medium-sized businesses often cannot justify the large CapEx of traditional BI, do not have the IT resources to run an on premise database and server system and are not sure that they have the breadth or depth of data to warrant such a system. Often their needs changed and evolved far faster than software could be developed and installed.

2) Traditional BI demands technical expertise both to manage and use. Business users could not quickly perform analysis themselves; queries had to be made through the IT department and often involved long delays.

As Bime is a SaaS application, we provide functionality to end users, not specifications to IT professionals. This means that Bime is centred on end-user experience and is constantly updated to incorporate user feedback and requests. Furthermore, Bime requires no upfront cost, no maintenance and no technical expertise, making it lightweight and scalable.

For more info, see http://businessintelligence.me