Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the most rapidly evolving and changing industries. Here at Bime HQ we are observing a paradigm shift as users discard more traditional forms of BI for new players, more agile and more cost effective solutions such as Bime. We are seeing changing user habits whereby many users are turning to SaaS solutions for the lightweight infrastructure, flexibility and scalability. More generally, BI has now become a viable economic option for many more SMBs where it may not have been before, allowing small companies to unlock their large amounts of data!

As more and more companies are moving towards introducing SaaS versions of their products, they have begun what could be a very significant shake-up in the contemporary software market. I think it goes without saying that the uptake of SaaS is going to increase over the years to come, and this is going to present challenges to several groups. Perhaps the biggest difficulty will be the varying levels of adoption across the market - in some areas SaaS will be considered a "disruptive technology" and in other "the only option". It may be that sometimes SaaS adoption will have little impact on software offerings.

Country-specific regulations governing privacy and data protection vary greatly. To help you grasp this issue at a high level, Forrester created a privacy heat map that denotes the degree of legal strictness across a range of nations. Check out Forrester's new interactive heat map on global privacy laws here: http://www.forrester.com/cloudprivacyheatmap