Meeting a growing demand from companies of all sizes for software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) tools that are easy to use, SAP AG  today announced the SAP® BusinessObjects™ BI OnDemand solution. Targeted at casual BI users currently underserved by products on the market, the solution will deliver a complete BI toolset in one flexible offering. Its ease-of-use also will allow them to be up and running with no prior experience or training. With SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand, business users will be able to access and visually navigate data from any source using SAP® BusinessObjects™ Explorer software. Even casual users can then combine that data in just a few clicks, and follow a guided path that walks them through reporting and analysis. The solution will have scalable pricing models based on business need, allowing companies to easily and cost-effectively scale as required.

Companies looking for ways to save on long-term costs often consider cloud services, specifically software as a service. SaaS offers creative ways to address how companies use technology, which lets them focus on what matters most:their core business objectives. For IT organizations that deal with complex, expensive maintenance chores, the SaaS model promises to ease the burden and reduce costs and complexity.

Although SaaS sounds like an ideal technology solution, it is not a cure-all for everything that ails IT, and it doesn’t always make a significant impact on long-term costs and resource use.

That’s why it’s important for companies to consider a wide range of variables when determining what the cost savings from using SaaS might be, including hardware, storage and management. At Avanade, we’ve developed a cost-modeling tool that uses more than 120 real-world variables to measure the true impact of one enterprise SaaS offering—Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)—on capital expenses, operating costs, energy use and carbon footprint.

When the economy takes a downward turn, company IT budgets are usually one of the first casualties.  This is the case with the current recession, as evidenced by an October 2008 CIO Magazine survey in which 40 percent of 234 IT chiefs surveyed said they are cutting spending, essentially freezing new IT initiatives, if not scrapping them altogether.

However, technology is a critical element of business, and despite the current economic climate, the need for reliable IT remains the same—especially when it comes to IT Maintenance or fundamental business applications such as email or customer relationship management (CRM). As companies across all industries face tough decisions about where to put their limited funds, here are three key reasons why the hosted or “software as a service” (SaaS) model makes a great deal of sense.

Financing