Will The Cloud Democratise BI?

I read with interest the announcement that Canadian BI vendor startup Indicee has successfully completed a second round of venture capital funding. In brief, Indicee sells a cloud solution where you upload your data and it works out automatically the relationships - freeing you to concentrate on answering your business questions. Here's a video from Indicee summarising their service:

Indicee Movie

I don't know the terms of the financing agreement but the US$6 million raised is another sign that BI in the cloud is an area that we should all keep a track of.

Why The Cloud?

Here are four reasons:

1. Indicee was founded by Mark Cunningham and Fred Tummonds both originally with Crystal Services - makers of Crystal Reports. Mark was a developer of the original Crystal Reports product - possibly the most ubiquitous BI tool outside of Excel in the market today.

2. Their early seed funding included all of the original founders of Crystal Services.

3. This second round adds Granite Ventures who have also previously invested in companies such as:

• Biz360 - Hosted Analytical Applications
• C-Decisions (dba DecisionView Software) - Analytic Software
• Crowd Science - Online Marketing Research
• Lucid Imagination, Inc. - Open Source Search
• Oversight Systems - Analytic Software
• Purisma - Customer Data Management SaaS, since sold to Dun & Bradstreet
• Siebel Systems - Analytic Software, since sold to Oracle
• Skytide - Digital Media Performance Management Software
• Vignette - Content Management Software, now a public company.

4. Their pricing model. It's cheap and offers small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) some real analytic grunt without the hassles of installing and running the software themselves:

Indicee is certainly not alone and there are other startups taking similar but distinctly unique services to market. For example, take a look at CloudSwitch, RightNow Technologies, RightScale or Good Data. Good Data offers real OLAP capabilities and runs on Amazon Web Services. It is also backed by an impressive list of people including Marc Andreessen, Tim O’Reilly, Esther Dyson and John Landry.

Many of these startups are building their services on top of the EC2 infrastructure provided by Amazon's web services.

New Choices

As we approach the end of the naughties the BI market is offering some interesting and fundamentally new choices to us:

• BI in the cloud
• SaaS
• Open source.

... and we can now choose to buy each of these services from all the big vendors (at big cost) as well as a raft of new entrants at substantially lower cost.

With prices like those from Indicee and others, we could be seeing a massive increase in the number of organisations making active use of analytics.

My Predictions?

It is still early days for SaaS and full cloud solutions - especially for larger organisations with mission critical BI. For the big boys SaaS and cloud BI will remain a niche option for a number of years. In 2010, of these 3 alternatives, open source will have the biggest impact by far.

SMEs will perhaps be the biggest beneficiaries of these market developments in 2010. As new adopters of BI they are more able to make use of the cloud - especially if the entry cost is less than AU$100 a month to launch your first analytic service.

Stay tuned.

Comments

[Yowadee]

thanks for this video but what u did not cover was cloud computing, aatculy what i think is that cloud computing is just a dream, vitrualization and hot server immigration on similar or even dissimlar hardware are not new things, the technology is if cloud computing right now require lots of work of programing and change of the way operating systems works, the funny thing is that it seems that ibm idea about mainframes is coming back again think about it !!

[Sanjeev]

I don't understand sotmehing, maybe someone can explain I understand that a cloud setup can balance between servers, by that I understand that it balances things like requests and ram usage, but how is the database thing done? For example a visitor logs in to a high traffic site, it can have 1000 servers but it still needs to read the user's user/pass from one db location, right? Or maybe the different servers keeps copies of the database synchronised non-stop? How does this work^ ?

[Steve Bennett]

Thanks for the comment RM Company. This is just scratching the surface and over the coming years I look forward to being surprised by the innovative analytic uses that the cloud will be put to.

[records management company]

Wow! This post has truly enlightened me... It is very informative and clear, and really helped me understand the situation and how to deal with it :)