By Boris Evelson

I'd like to drill into some more details on my BI SaaS blog from September 2009. A key critical point to "what differentiates one BI SaaS vendor from another" discussion is what really constitutes multi-tenant architecture. Here are some initiall thoughts to stimulate the discussion:

• DBMS. There's got to be back end, DBMS architecture that allows for one of the following:
• • Automatically generate a separate DBMS instance for each client  
  • Use same DBMS instance for multiple clients, but automatically generate a set of unique tables for each client  
  • Use same DBMS instance and tables for multiple clients, but automatically assign unique keys to to each client so that they can only update and retrieve their own rows  
• Application. Similar functionality has to exist in the application tier:
• • Automatically connect to the appropriate, client specific DBMS instance, or 
  • Automatically use views that only point to client specific tables, or
  • Append "where" clause to each SQL statement to only retrieve client specific rows  

By Boris Evelson

By Boris Evelson

As many of my readers know, for years I’ve been quite skeptical about non-mainstream BI solutions, such as BI SaaS. Security, control, operational risk, data, metadata and application integration are just some of the requirements for enterprise BI that are still on my watch list as potential reasons to be weary about BI SaaS. However, I am also a very pragmatic analyst and truly believe that nothing but supply and demand drive the markets.  And I am now, slowly but surely, beginning to believe there couldn’t be a better case for demand for BI SaaS especially after findings from one of the project that I am currently conducting.

I recently talked to a few dozen non-IT professionals (specifically in front office roles, such as sales and marketing) across multiple industries, regions and company sizes. Guess how many of them fully or partially relied on IT for their day to day operational and strategic information needs? BIG FAT ZERO!!! This finding was a huge surprise to me – yes, I did expect to find something like less then 50% reliance on IT, but I surely did not expect to find 0%.

By Boris Evelson

I am so glad that my Information Week article BI in Healthcare is receiving interest and mostly positive feedback. I believe that this is indeed a very important topic to write about, especially considering how behind the times the industry is, and what a unique opportunity we have right now to get it right. We so strongly believe that this is such a critical IT issue and challenge, that Forrester is even bending its own rules slightly – typically all our research is “role” based, not industry based, as we most often find that challenges and requirements by role are almost always very similar across industries. Healthcare and public sectors seem to be a big exception, and therefore, I and some of my colleagues do plan to publish more Healthcare IT specific research. For example, I am currently in the middle of surveying top 30+ BI vendors specializing in Healthcare against 40+ criteria. Stay tuned to the results of this research. And my colleague, Craig LeClair (http://www.forrester.com/rb/search/results.jsp?N=0+11226), is in the midst of conducting research on EMR best practices.

By Boris Evelson

Whoever says that Business Intelligence (BI) market is commoditizing is smoking something funny. From where we sit, it remains active, vibrant and full of opportunities both on the buyer and the seller side. On the buyer side the market is far from mature with multiple architecture, implementation, governance and organizational challenges. On the seller side we track over 20 “next generation” BI features that vendors are just beginning to address.