BI in the Cloud
It has been an uphill task for business users to derive the maximum benefits out of their BI landscape mainly due to the below factors-
- Lack of reliable data at the right time
- Limited BI coverage for some of the business areas
- SAP ERP becomes bigger and more comprehensive that BI complexity increases
- Ever expanding sources of data as relevant for BI
The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms , 2008 shows that 'On demand BI' offerings are increasing and the subscriber growth for H1 2009 has risen to 300,000 subscribers .
BI in the cloud uses the Saas( Software-as-a-service ) or a On Demand Model approach for BI and is a complementary approach to on-premise datawarehousing and BI .
Web-based access for users spread across geographies and companies results in a BI on demand service and helps lower resource requirements for deployment and ongoing management .
Once BI on-demand services are established , a self-service option for BI can be kicked off where users can share reports, dashboards inside and outside the organization without VPN , receive automatic updates for most current information , schedule reports and also combine on-premise data with on-demand data to get a holistic view.
This is how it will work - We have different mechanisms for data extraction such as SAP extractors , 3rd party ETL , flat files , BO data integrator to name a few .
SAP R3 , SAP BW , 3rd party data , simple databases, departmental applications can be some of the data sources for the on-demand datawarehouse.
Data loading takes place into the on-demand warehouse in the cloud via the usual process of staging , processing , transformation and loading and voila , your reports are ready to use as and when you need it ...
SAP Business Objects has partnered with oCo Inc in offering 'BI in a SaaS model' for the SMB market segment.
