Next Steps for BI

The trend toward offering business intelligence software as a service has taken some shape over the last year or so, with well-known vendors such as Business Objects (recently acquired by SAP), SAS, and Cognos (a recent IBM acquisition) and start-ups alike getting into the space.

In a report last year, Aberdeen Research attributed the trend to the fact that the large enterprise BI market is reaching saturation, and to the fact that smaller organizations don’t typically have the IT resources and BI skill to do major BI implementations, but certainly have the data volume and complexity to require its assistance.

LogiXML sees it in a similar fashion. The vendor, which has been building BI tools for delivering reports and analysis via the web since 2000, later this quarter or next plans to offer an on-demand approach to its customers.

“We are seeing a lot more people comfortable with the idea of hosting data in other places,” says David Abramson director of product management. “There’s not a question now of people not accepting that as potentially a way to work with business intelligence and reporting and analysis tools.”

That said, there may be some limitations in who and how the approach is embraced. Abramson acknowledges that it’s not necessarily the case that large companies will take all their data and reporting to the SaaS model. But he says its current target audience — small and medium-size businesses and smaller units within larger organizations — may be better suited to the model, because it offers more cost-effective licensing and faster time to market, as well as makes it easier to produce output and content.

For those smaller business units that are perhaps disconnected from the big engine of BI within the enterprise, the on-demand model now takes not just the creation and presentation of reports but even the management of the data out of the IT team’s hands and puts it into the provider’s.

Is that potentially a problem? There may be some trade-offs around how the IT unit itself might handle the complexity of managing that data or different ways of supporting security models in exchange for greater flexibility, but the fast turnarounds and lower total cost of ownership will make up for that — at least in the eyes of the business units, Abramson says.

It’s perhaps the next logical next step in the journey to pervasive BI. LogiXML in the version 9 release of its platform this year (a full suite of BI reporting, analysis, and services components to manage BI and reporting needs) also expanded on that concept. It introduced widgits — little bits of Javascript code — for integrating information from multiple sources (a traditional database and data warehouse but also web services, files, Google online apps, and so on) and deploying corporate data and information to anything and anyplace on the web.

“You can take this script and open up the avenue of embed-ability with reporting,” says Abramson.

So, if you want to make BI data available to the corporate intranet, it can incorporate Logi widget code and dynamically serve content to users who access that. Or it might be a blog and you want to take information and paste it into a blog post, so you then have the message and the Logi widget of BI data dynamically served up from the reports server. It’s another way to expand the integration and delivery path to this content, and make it available to masses in a robust and easy-to-work with way, says Abramson.