Steven Cohen, MD of Softline Pastel, believes that in the BI market, value-added resellers have a much bigger role to play with SMEs than with larger corporates.
"The resellers must act more as partners than simply installers. Often SMEs don`t have a dedicated IT guy," he explains.
His advice to SMEs is to go to Web sites and look at demos and assess how it can work in business. "Play around with the solution," he says. "Don`t think historical accounting because BI allows you to explore data trends." He explains that BI lets you be creative with your data and helps you look forward to the `what ifs`, and this is very beneficial to an organisation of any size.
"SMEs do not need all the bells and whistles like the bigger guys do," he explains. With the introduction of BI to the masses, smaller companies are becoming more and more used to the concept and embracing it.
"People are less scared of it now as it not such a huge thing anymore," says Cohen. "Everyone now has the opportunity to consider it."
Martin Rennhackkamp, strategic information director at the PBT Group, also tells us that when it comes to implementation time, size does not matter. "Delays are not a size thing, but depend on red tape," he says. "It will take longer to implement in the bank and insurance industries, for example, but in retail, where they need more immediate info and don`t have to complicate the architecture to satisfy very strict security requirements, there are almost no delays."
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