This is a question that many clients ask.  "Should SaaS be part of my BI (and PM) strategy?"  When I answer yes, the obvious next question is "how?"  The complete answer differs by client but there are some common threads regarding SaaS' place and fitting it into the on-premise BI environment.

Lessons Learned From LucidEra
A recent blog by Ted Cuzzillio highlights some of the challenges SaaS BI faces.  He provides some great insight from Ken Rudin (founder and CEO) and Darren Cunningham from the now defunct LucidEra about why their SaaS model failed.  I suggest you read the entire blog as it has some great insight from Ken and Darren about why some of their customers struggled with SaaS BI.  Both SaaS users/prospects and other SaaS vendors can learn from Ken and Darren's frank discussion of their experience.



My take on their plight is that their customers were looking to SaaS BI to provide push BI vs. pull BI.  What I mean by that is that their customers did not want to build their own queries and information delivery, they wanted it to be prepackaged and turnkey.  The following excerpt from Ted's blog sums this up nicely:

When he questioned further, he found they'd been doing "essentially nothing interesting" with the service. They had been running the simplest reports, not asking new questions or reaching for new insight in any way.  "We were offering a powerful tool," he said, "and they were saying they didn't know what to do with this thing." He compared it to installing an MRI machine in someone's living room and expecting the person to diagnose themselves.

SaaS BI has its Place
I think this highlights quite well where SaaS BI and PM fits in the overall strategy.  If you are looking at a process (and related queries and output) that can be standardized and is not expected to dynamically change on a regular basis then SaaS makes a lot of sense.  In this situation a SaaS solution can be implemented more quickly and at less cost than an on-premise solution.  But more dynamic processes that require in depth knowledge of the data and require ad-hoc queries and information delivery tend to be addressed better with an on-premise solution.

So, in my humble opinion in most companies SaaS BI should not be looked at as your BI strategy but as supplementing your BI strategy.  With that said, I think SaaS BI has a place in almost any company if requirements are properly assessed and expectations are appropriately set.