Business intelligence takes to the cloud

Beverley Head
Thursday, 11 March 2010 15:23

Business intelligence applications are the latest technology to get the cloud treatment with new research suggesting that 69 per cent of Australian CIOs are using, planning or considering BI delivered as a service.

While research from analyst Longhaus shows that on-premises business intelligence solutions still dominate the Australian landscape, it reveals a growing enthusiasm for cloud based BI. According to research director Sam Higgins, Australia has reached the 'tipping point' with respect to business intelligence in the cloud - something which has not been lost on vendors which are increasingly touting their solutions provided in a software as a service form.

At the SME end of the marketplace are suppliers such as MyDIALS which has partnered with NetSuite to provide dashboard style business analytics from the cloud. The company claims it can already pull data for analysis from 35 different applications, process that in the cloud, and return it to the user presented as a digital dashboard.

The company's president and chief executive officer, Wayne Morris, is currently in Australia and today claimed that organisations were interested in the flexibility offered by cloud based BI and the speed of deployment that it offered. At present MyDIALS SaaS systems can be deployed in days or weeks, but Morris foreshadowed a new service being developed with NetSuite that would allow BI solutions to be rolled out in a day.

While speedy roll out is impressive, it is only valuable if the information being presented to the organisation is of use. Rolling out KPIs fast can be entirely counterproductive if they are the wrong KPIs.

There is already evidence that many BI projects have failed to deliver on their promise, regardless of how long they have taken to design and deploy.

A report issued last month by KPMG found that while business spends more than $US60 billion a year on BI projects globally,  half of the projects fail due to poor data quality and a disconnect between BI and the business strategy.