My colleagues and I have just completed yet another engagement with a large client — one of dozens recently — who was facing a to be or not to be decision: whether to move its BI platform and applications to the cloud. It’s a very typical question that our clients are asking these days, mainly for the following two reasons:

1. In many cases, their current on-premises BI solutions are too inflexible to support the business now, much less in the future.
2. The relative success of cloud-based CRM (SFDC and others) solutions may indicate that cloud offers a better alternative.

These clients put these two statements together and make the reasonable assumption that cloud BI will solve many of the current BI challenges that cloud-based CRM solved. Reasonable? Yes. Correct? Not so fast — the only correct answer is “It depends.”

Let’s take a couple of steps back. First, let’s define applications or packaged solutions vs. platforms (because BI requires both).

Packaged solutions

• Subscribe to a solution-like CRM
• Provide standard business functions to all customers (which makes it different from “hosting;” see below)
• Difficult to tailor to specific needs
• Usually are used synonymously (but incorrectly, see below) with software-as-a-service (SaaS)

 Platforms for building solutions

• Subscribe to tools and resources to build solutions like CRM
• Provide standard technical functions to developers
• Contain limited, if any, business application functionality
• Usually labeled either as platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).