BA is not a new acronym. It is short for business analytics. On-demand business analytics (BA), however, is new and I want to give you PivotLink’s perspective on why on-demand BA is becoming increasingly relevant to business users and organizations across industries.
Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives have been high on enterprise IT’s priority list for decades. There are countless on-premise BI tools in the market today. In spite of all the advances in hardware and computing capability, BI implementations continue to be the most challenging IT projects, filled with broken promises, low user adoption and poor ROI. Instead of creating an enterprise-wide view of the business, current practices typically result in a proliferation of complex information silos that are hard to build and maintain. Worse yet, they become the very source of information bottleneck and the dreaded multiple versions of the truth problem that they are supposed to fix. Instead of helping IT to deliver timely and accurate information to decision makers, they become a significant source of distraction for precious IT resources and CAPEX.
On-demand BA represents a radical new value proposition by making business analytics, or core BI, a secure, affordable, easy-to-use and scalable solution to more people than ever before. Leveraging a cloud-based infrastructure, on-demand BA has the potential to support the trend of increased collaboration within and beyond the extended enterprise by allowing authorized users to access relevant information anywhere, any time.
The rapidly changing landscape of Web based consumer and business applications is ushering in a paradigm shift in how key IT initiatives are delivered. Savvy enterprises are discovering that partnering with the right on-demand solution provider like PivotLink can bring unparalleled level of speed, quality and reliability to business users. In the words of one our customers at Macys.com “PivotLink has changed my expectations of how fast, easy and affordable BI can be.” One important reason is that the focus of an on-demand service provider is much better aligned with that of the businesses they serve. For an on-demand BA service provider to be successful, it must focus on innovations that greatly simplify the solution deployment process, deliver extremely high operational efficiency and reliability, and ensure widest possible secure distribution of functionality, none of which are traits of traditional on-premise BI tools. It not only frees IT from the onerous aspects of maintaining on-premise BI solutions, but also gives end users a new relationship with their data and new found capabilities to develop analytical competence that helps drive better individual as well as overall business performance.
On-demand BA solutions are gaining traction because unlike traditional on-premise BI, which requires the buy-in and support of multiple divisions within a company, it can be purchased directly by the line of business owner. The monthly-subscription pricing model alleviates the need for large upfront CAPEX to ensure that an enterprise realizes the maximum and immediate return from the get go.
We believe that as you ponder the most cost-effective way to deliver the next generation BI to your enterprise, where there is an increasing need to accommodate information consumers collaborating inside and outside your firewall across the globe, you will find that on-demand BA may just be the ticket to your success. The world is changing and so is BI – according to PivotLink. Our vision of highly secure, easy-to-use and affordable tools delivered as a service is the vision for the next generation of enterprise BI – and we are leading the way!
PivotLink isn’t the only one who believes that organizations are ready for the next generation of BI. It’s interesting to read articles by cnet’s Stephen Shankland and searchCIO’s Anne McCrory and to see that Gartner is calling out BA (in lieu of BI) as a top 10 strategic technology for 2010. Check out Doug Henschen’s recent InformationWeek article The New BI is (Finally) Here – PivotLink is featured in the section “SaaS Makes it Mark in BI”.
