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!

Forrester Research are some of the best in the business for keeping check of this rapidly changing industry and providing market leading BI analysis and insight. They recently conducted a survey of BI vendors (in which we participated) and now they conducting asurvey of BI users in which you can express your expectations and your plans for implementing BI.

Forrester state the objective of the survey is “to help our clients understand business intelligence software vendor pricing and licensing differences, as well as attempt to see if there are some clear patterns in the total cost of ownership between different vendor products.”

As perception of cloud-based IT services by top-level IT management pros becomes increasingly positive, an increase in investment in at least one area of the cloud is expected in 2011 over the current year.
A new survey conducted on behalf of the US-based data center services company Savvis found that more than 60 percent of companies expect to increase spending on hosted software and Software-as-a-Service solutions. About half of survey respondents expect an increase in spending on hardware; 45 percent expect to invest in installed software, 43 percent in IT services and 35 percent in IT outsourcing.

Source: Enterprise-Grade Cloud Computing Adoption: Trends and Purchase Requirements. Study commissioned by Savvis

While changes in spending over the past 12 months in the latter four categories are in the 1-5 percent range, the increase in hosted software and SaaS spending is 24 percent. The percentage of respondents that expected non-installed software spending to stay the same went from more than 50 percent this year to 30 percent in 2011.
More than 20 percent of respondents said they were already using enterprise-grade cloud-based solutions for apps they own or manage and 45 percent said they were expecting to be using such solutions within the next two years.
While identifying the right projects and areas of the business that can benefit from cloud-based solutions is in most cases done by the IT side of the house, more than 20 percent of respondents to the survey said business leaders sometimes bypass IT and buy the solutions on their own.
The survey also found that security has remained the most important factor during evaluation of cloud-based solutions, with more than 60 percent of respondents saying this factor was “critical”.
The report, titled Enterprise-Grade Cloud Computing Adoption: Trends and Purchase Requirements, was based on more than 170 responses to the survey. Most of the respondents had IT-management titles; nearly half were CIO’s or CTO’s. Respondents came from companies with average staff sizes of about 13,000.

 For the original article: click here

The Changing Landscape of Corporate IT

Two key business trends support a move toward an integrated central business shared service, according to the Corporate Executive Board

Here is a report from our friends from Bloomberg commenting on the ever-changing landscape of IT. The article points to these shifts as part of a larger investigation into the five-year outlook of corporate IT organization and management. Organizations that do not prepare for the shifts will struggle to exploit technology and will find themselves managing an inefficient IT function and an under-performing corporate center.

To read the full article - click here

I recently read an article by Anita Moorthy, Sr.Solutions Marketing Manager for Novell, Inc.  in which she articulates the results of a survey on what organizations want when purchasing SaaS products.

It seems that the group falls into 2 categories:

• Those that want their needs met by developing capabilities in-house
  • The issue being the customers bring a variety of identity management solutions to the relationship which will require devoted development resources to a never-ending cycle of customization.
• Those that would rather someone else take care of it for them
  •  2 most popular options being OEMing through a third-party or sourcing through their hosing vendor.

She goes on to mention that Identity Management is essentially an infrastructure function. Since contemporary hosting tends to be moving towards infrastructure as a service (IaaS) it's likely these providers will have the technical know-how to integrate IaaS into there offerings and should have a definite stake in supporting it into the future.