The recent economic slowdown has left many organizations with no other choice but to make every penny spent on IT count! More and more enterprises are turning towards cloud computing, though they know that, cloud computing is in the nascent stage. Cloud computing presents a fundamental, efficient cost effective computing deployment model. And this can go handy in managing tight economy.
As per Gartner, Business Intelligence is one of the top spends of enterprises consecutively for the past three years. In the year 2009, enterprises spent about $ 10 Billion on Business Intelligence software. Also, Gartner predicts a 7.9% growth till the year 2012 in BI space.
On the one hand, enterprises need intelligent software tools to make right decisions; on the other hand they need to be prudent on their technology spending. This has resulted in the popularity of Business Intelligence in the cloud. In maintaining the competitive edge of the business operations, enterprises are forced to look at technologies like Cloud BI.
Cloud computing may turn as a key enabler for BI for the following reasons:
- More data is moving in to the cloud; particularly, with the burst of Cloud Storage options and RDBMS availability in the cloud. Cloud is emerging as a major data source.
- Data workloads are becoming increasingly heavy with geo spread. Cloud is good fit for these workloads.
- Analytical and Reporting tools applications are increasingly required to be used as service to meet the varied demands.
- Only limited enterprises have enjoyed the full benefit of On-Premises based BI installations. BI technology needs to be tested in enterprises before full adoption and for this sandbox testing cloud is a best choice.
- Computing and data storage resources can be planned in incremental basis in cloud and paid for usage; compared to full system capital expenses payment with traditional BI projects.
We are a seeing a spate of new Cloud BI vendors in the marketplace. Additionally, the existing big guns like IBM – Cognos, SAP – Business Objects, MicroStrategy, Tibco etc., are jumping in to the cloud band wagon. IBM is leading the way in cloud computing.
IBM Cognos and Smart Analytics Cloud
IBM Cognos is positioned as one of the leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for BI Software. With more than 23000 enterprise installations, IBM Cognos is one of the key players in BI Software Industry. It is a proven product with integrated BI, analytics, scorecards, dashboards and reporting. IBM has come up with its cloud offering IBM Smart Analytics Cloud. This has been built on IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence software and IBM System z platform. This service enables the delivery of business intelligence and analytical solution in a private cloud environment. IBM itself has implemented Smart Analytics Cloud within IBM and that is called Blue Insight. This supports 1 petabyte of data serving about 20000 global employees. The system z platform in which it is built on uses cryptographic hardware accelerators to handle up to 10000 secure transactions per second. The delivery can be over web or through mobile.
The value proposition of Smart Analytics Cloud:
- A single BI solution supporting all functions of business.
- Single point of IT operational control.
- Reduces the capex and opex.
- Supports self service approach reducing time and effort servicing new departments and users.
- A common BI across the enterprise spread over the globe.
The following are some of the industry experts’ observations on business intelligence in the cloud:
- IT spending will continue to be under pressure in enterprises. IT department pressed with the need to deliver solution will naturally focus on meeting the immediate need by going in for cloud computing solutions like cloud BI.
- Cloud Computing based solutions will grow on maturity level and emerge as powerful alternates to licensed software.
- BI will continue to remain as top priority for enterprises as they are facing challenges from all fronts. The need of better understanding of the market place, customers and internal operations will be felt more than ever.
- Companies will get more pervasive with BI. The democratization of information – making the key data available to employees when they need them – so that they can make better decisions on their operations, will play a significant roll with the quick deployment of technology.