Demand for business intelligence (BI) tools, technologies, and approaches is increasing across Asia Pacific (AP). Competitive pressures are driving investments in reporting and decision support to improve operational insights and efficiency. Widespread adoption of mobile technology and social computing has driven interest in visualization capabilities and real-time analytics. Finally, rapidly changing data privacy laws and regulations have forced organizations to implement more stringent information governance capabilities and processes.

Despite growing demand, BI strategies and execution remain immature — poorly implemented and poorly managed — across most of AP. This extends well beyond BI projects to include broader analytics-related investments in areas like information management, data warehousing (DW), and decision support. But while the ROI of BI is consistently underwhelming and the technology often delivers less value to the business than expected, BI-related spending is still set to increase across the region.

 Specific BI drivers vary by country, vertical, and organization size in AP, but some drivers are consistent across the region. Users are increasingly demanding the ability to make informed decisions, and there’s a growing understanding across AP that companies need to measure and value assets, processes, and decisions analytically and infuse business processes with added insight, often in real time. With clear, consistent demand, why do most organizations still struggle to deliver value from BI-related investments?

One of the core priniciples of Agile is a realistic attitude about the unknown. We might have a rough idea of how much work it will take to complete a project, but we cannot state with the certainty of a papal bull how we're going to get to that destination. Therefore, Agile teams have to embrace Agile principles like loving plans, but abandoning any fetishistic relationship with specific, immutable plans.

Agilists learn to live with uncertainty, but they're far from fatalistic about it. In fact, the opposite is true: the truly good Agile teams assume a very aggressive posture about the management of uncertainty. In this respect, Agile software teams behave a lot like military professionals. First, they accept the inherent unpredictability that they'll face, either on the battlefield or in the backlog. They adopt maxims like, "No plan survives contact with the enemy," or concepts like friction, to describe the nature, sources, and effects of uncertainty. Next, they develop strategies, like the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, and act), to navigate through the minefields of unexpected outcomes. And finally, they adopt a great deal of rigor and discipline, plus no small amount of self-criticism, to the application of these uncertainty-management practices.

SaaS vendors must collect customer insights for innovation and compliance.

As of the end of last year, about 30% of companies from our Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2011, were using some software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution; that number will grow to 45% by the end of 2012 and 60% by the end of 2013. The public cloud market for SaaS is the biggest and fastest-growing of all of the cloud markets ($33 billion in 2012, growing to $78 billion by the end of 2015).

However, most of this growth is based on the cannibalization of the on-premises software market; software companies need to build their cloud strategy or risk getting stuck in the much slower-growing traditional application market and falling behind the competition. This is no easy task, however. Implementing a cloud strategy involves a lot of changes for a software company in terms of products, processes, and people.

A successful SaaS strategy requires an open architecture (note: multitenancy is not a prerequisite for a SaaS solution from a definition point of view but is highly recommended for vendors for better scale) and a flexible business model that includes the appropriate sales incentive structure that will bring the momentum to the street. For the purposes of this post, I’d like to highlight the challenge that software vendors need to solve for sustainable growth in the SaaS market: maintaining and increasing customer insights.

SugarCRM was kind enough to invite me to its analyst day and conference — a three-day event packed with product, strategy, customer, and partner information. The firm’s focus was clearly on its momentum into the enterprise. Here are my thoughts:

• The CRM market still has room to grow. Sugar used IDC’s numbers to project CRM market growth: $18.74 billion for 2012, $19.97 billion for 2013, and $21.37 billion for 2014. Even though CRM vendor solutions are mature, the CRM market has not stagnated.
• The SugarCRM 6.5 product. Today, SugarCRM has 1 million users, has seen 11 million downloads, is used by 80,000 organizations, and has 350 partners on five continents supporting the product. Its newest release focuses on usability and performance enhancements. It offers simplified navigation, an enhanced UI design, a new search framework with integrated full-text search, new calendaring and scheduling capabilities, IBM platform support, and deeper integration with third-party apps. Although the product lacks advanced social features and robust analytics, it does provide solid, well-rounded CRM capabilities.
• The open source focus. Open source is more than a movement. It provides results by allowing its 30,000-large developer ecosystem to evolve the product in line with customer demand. “Open” is also part of Sugar’s culture — for example, pricing is readily available on its website, and you can try the product for free.