I have wondered for some time why business intelligence has been so slow to come up with software as a service solutions. Celequest has done so, and this week sees the launch of another, called LucidEra. This company aims to offer a ciomplete BI suite including ETL, data quality, database schema, OLAP server and reporting. Given that enterprises are prepared to trust their customer data to third parties e.g. salesforce.com, there is no reason I can see why they would not do the same with business intelligence.
The advantages of a service offering is seem to me twofold, First is the easier and more reliable deployment. Many problems in software stem from environmental incompatibilities e.g. some weird combination of releases of Oracle and Tomcat and something else that cause obscure bugs which the vendor could never have tested for, and which are hard to reproduce. This problem goes away with hosted solutions, where the web browser is just about the only software the client can screw around with. Secondly, though this is a commercial rather than technical issue, the leasing that software as a service typically uses means an easier point of entry. One mid-ranking customer can sign off on a few months of leasing in a way that they could not for a multi-hundred thousand dollar software purchase, which would end up in steering committees and a formal procurement process.
Salesforce has shown what can be done with this approach if well executed. It will be interesting to track the progress of LucidEra, Celequest and others that emerge into this space.
