This development is important because the demand for more effective BI and analytics capabilities has never been more acute. Traditional BI and analytics software has fallen far short of fulfilling the needs of most organizations because it required significant capital investment and specialized skills to implement sophisticated systems and create vast data warehouses which could only be utilized by a handful of people.  As a result, the majority of business executives and end-users couldn’t benefit from the data or possible insights it could produce to meet their day-to-day needs or strategic planning objectives.
Compounding this age-old challenge is today’s realities:

• Intensifying competition
• Escalating customer demands
• Proliferation of new data sources
• Increasingly dispersed workforce

As a result of these forces, corporate end-users and executives alike need to tap into a broader array of information, real-time to gain the insight necessary to make better tactical and strategic decisions. Their legacy systems which could barely satisfy the needs of a relatively static work environment are no match for this more dynamic world.

The explosive growth of innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions has spawned a new generation of Cloud-based BI/analytics as well. In fact, I believe that any SaaS solution which doesn’t include solid BI/analytic capabilities built into the basic service is not fulfilling the promise of SaaS. This standard was first set by the iconic dashboard included in Salesforce.com’s original customer relationship management (CRM) service. Now, every major SaaS-based enterprise app includes basic analytics capabilities.

But, that is just the start. A growing assortment of independent Cloud-based BI/analytics tools and solutions vendors have emerged to offer add-on capabilities to the leading SaaS enterprise apps. And, these add-on tools can snap into the larger enterprise apps more easily because of various APIs, connectors and other integration tools. Where these tools don’t fully bridge the gaps, a new generation of systems integrators (SIs) is pulling together various legacy and Cloud-based data sources.

Speaking of data sources, the Cloud is also helping organizations contend with the explosive growth of ‘Big Data’. Rather than make big capital investments in their own server farms to capture and control the growing volume of structured and unstructured data, smart organizations are offloading, or ‘out-tasking’, this chore to dependable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers.

Put together, these various layers of Cloud functionality and interoperability are enabling a widening array of organizations to capture, synthesize and disseminate timely information and analysis to better support their businesses.