Business Intelligence ‘lags behind’ in the cloud

Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming increasingly appealing to enterprises to run various applications, but it appears Business Intelligence (BI) is one example where the benefits of the cloud aren’t met.

This was the opinion of Bernard Dalle, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures and director for companies including Mimecast and Pentaho.

Speaking to Cloud Pro, he sang the praises of some types of software’s performance in the cloud, such as HR programmes, CRM and customer support.   

Mentioning companies he invests in, such as OpenX, Dalle said: “[It] fits very well in the cloud. There is not a lot of data following these apps, it is compute on the cloud.”

However, when we asked what applications didn’t perform so well, the one illustration he offered was BI.

“Where the cloud is still kind of lagging behind is more, for example, the Business Intelligence (BI) side,” said Dalle. “Whenever you have to move a lot of data from another cloud or on premise to the cloud service, I think it is still a challenge.”

“As people say, data has mass and moving data around is not the most efficient thing to do right now, so I think that is where cloud BI, for example, is still in its infancy, as opposed to CRM and more HR or online advertising [applications].”

There are still ways BI can be put into practice though; it just means you need your data out in the cloud already.

“I think one way [to improve], like one of our companies Pentaho is doing, is you go down the ISV (Independent Software Vendor) route,” he said. “Essentially offer the BI capabilities on top of services that themselves are already in the cloud.”

“If your data is already in the cloud… and you want to be able to analyse it, produce reports, drill down etc, then the easiest way to do it is to have that BI capability loaded on top of where the data already is in the cloud.”

So is it better to keep BI on premise for now? “I think a lot of people to coming to that conclusion, yes,” said Dalle. “It is not worth the hassle and the cost to move that data over and [if] you move small samples of the data, then it is not comprehensive data analysis.”