Article written by Quentin Gallivan @ PivotLink

Software as a Service (SaaS) BI adoption is undergoing a sea-change. Industry-watchers expect implementations to grow steadily in the coming year, as businesses seek to deploy intuitive BI tools and applications cost-effectively to more users, reduce time to value and time to scale, and lower capital expenditures. In many respects, these are historic times for BI.

Amid the tumult and noise, it’s important to understand the context for SaaS BI adoption, and why it has rapidly become a viable solution for businesses in a variety of industries. Here are five developing trends that promise to fuel the growth of SaaS BI.

 1. SaaS BI implementations will grow at a faster rate than on-premise BI.

The era of high-risk, complex, and time-consuming BI implementations may be finally coming to an end.  It is rapidly being replaced by a new era that demands quick BI wins defined by specific business use-cases. Time to value is imperative in the new era of BI. Projects must be implemented in days, not months or years, and provide an immediate return to the business user.

SaaS BI is experiencing an uptick in investment, market visibility, and user adoption. Basic reporting and analysis have become a commodity, so there is little reason for any customer or business to invest in on-premise capabilities with the price/performance ratio that SaaS vendors offer.

We will see on-premise BI vendors’ revenue streams shrink as the SaaS BI value proposition goes mainstream. Successful SaaS BI vendors will be those whose offerings were designed to scale within cloud-computing architectures, and whose marginal cost per additional user approaches zero.

In addition, SaaS BI has developed into a superlative and affordable augmentation strategy for legacy BI implementations. By enabling IT to better support business with highly-secure, easy-to-use tools, and right-time data, SaaS BI will be viewed as the best tool for high value, quick BI wins at an affordable cost.