Cloud-based BI still some way off

CLOUD-BASED business intelligence (BI) is one of the next big hype markets, but like all hype markets, we need to separate the hype chaff from the reality wheat and consider: what is the promise and will the market deliver on it? Is it ahead of its time?

KEITH JONES

BI in the cloud is the next market after the hosted BI market and we can look at  how well that has progressed to see where BI in the cloud really is.

The slowdown has caused the demise of a flagship hosted solution.

After four years LucidEra, which showed promise and led the hype curve, has just 40 customers and is not a viable concern.

Hosted analytics seems to be doing well, so there is some hope. This market is an indicator as people will have to be comfortable with handing over their data, and they will have to find an infrastructure to support it and an offering with the flexibility to deliver business value. This market needs to be commoditised before savings can be seen.

To deliver quick results the business needs must be known and there is no one version of best practice that everyone can agree on for any market sector. The hosted market is still a way from delivering value, so the cloud market is also a way off.

Google offers hosted BI developed by Panorama through Google Apps.

This shows what is possible, and it looks slick. It is not a commercial offering: Google was doing it to get up Microsoft's nose.

Panorama will soon be releasing the first fully repeatable hosting platform.

In our country bandwidth will be the largest restricting factor, although in the major urban centres this will become a non-issue. The key success criterion will be response times on the client.

So we are still quite a way off from cloud-based BI. The toolsets also need to evolve, but companies like Panorama and MicroStrategy seem to be moving down the right road. This is the market of the future, and over time, this is where much of BI will be done. The question is, how much time? Quite a few years.

About the author: Keith Jones is MD of Harvey Jones, an Avisen group company