Comments on: SaaS BI – Software as a service model in Business Intelligence

By: How Business Intelligence Influences PLM? « Daily PLM Think Tank Blog

How Business Intelligence Influences PLM? « Daily PLM Think Tank Blog — Mon, 18 May 2009 02:15:42 +0000

[...] What are the potential technological routes? Companies loaded with Microsoft technologies have an easy option to try Microsoft BI and use some of the Excel-related applications. Another option is to invest in big backbones connected PLM and BI stacks. In context of all cloud discussions, an interesting option would be to use SaaS based BI options. [...]

By: Darren Cunningham

Darren Cunningham — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:53:14 +0000

Jim, the answer is all of the above.

Hopefully be now you’ve found what you’re looking for.

By: John Martinez

John Martinez — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:30:27 +0000

Jim,

It is entirely possible to embed PivotLink into salesforce either through Tab or iFrame.

Please send me an email if you would like to discuss.

johnm@pivotlink.com

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:30:55 +0000

So all I have are questions :

You mentioned that these integrate into Saleforce.com. … Can you clarify ?
Do the interfaces integrate ?
Does the Salesforce data integrate ?
All of the above ?

I was looking to embed a SaaS BI solution within SalesForce.. is that possible with these vendors ?

By: biguru

biguru — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:20:02 +0000

Ken

Thanks for your comment which provides valuable insight into the inner workings of the traditional BI companies.

As far as business models are concerned, the Big Four have no choice but to have an all-encompassing portfolio. With increasing saturation in the enterprise space, they’re going after the SMEs – and this certainly will make the bigger enterprise customers more demanding somewhere down the line.

The fact that we are only just starting to address data quality issues with DQ and Master Data Management speaks of the scope of improvement possible by smaller players. As with any field which sees competition, BI will also benefit the consumer from such value-add areas.

By: Ken Rudin

Ken Rudin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:15:22 +0000

Thanks for a great post. I’d like to expand on your comment that the technology implications of on-demand BI for the traditional BI vendors are daunting. Yes, they certainly are, but even more challenging are the business implications for the traditional vendors. I ran the Siebel CRM OnDemand divisions at Siebel, and was responsible for leading Siebel’s entry into the on-demand world. We spent a lot of time making sure we had the technology issues covered, but what ultimately caused the biggest challenges were the inability to change business models. The Sales team wanted to focus on the classic million-dollar enterprise deals with large commissions, and no matter how we played around with the commission structures, we couldn’t get our sales people to focus on the on-demand product. And, the solution of creating a separate on-demand sales team caused an internal civil war. The Marketing department couldn’t figure out how to tout the advantages of on-demand without the message sounding somewhat challenging to the older on-premise software. Finance didn’t like the fact that they had to recognize on-demand revenue month-by-month instead of all up-front, and they didn’t like that usually they didn’t get all the cash up-front either. And the list goes on…

It’s because of these reasons that I started LucidEra as a company focused exclusively on on-demand BI. With no conflicting business models to wrestle with, we can focus on innovation and the success of our customers. Just as salesforce.com ultimately succeeded over those companies wrestling with the “hybrid” on-premise / on-demand business models, you’ll see the same thing happen in the BI world.