Very often companies need to get an outside partner for a BI project. The most common reason is that an organization is implementing a new process or a new technology with which no one in the organization is familiar. In order to motivate or mentor in-house people on the new BI initiatives, it is highly desirable for a company to have an experienced consultant running the show.

Using a SaaS model, global enterprises, mid-market companies, and individual business units can leverage outside resources to manage their data. With lower cost and increased value for the business, SaaS BI solutions are becoming more accepted, providing a point solution for vital problems that allow business leaders to get back to managing their business, not their data.

Traditionally, BI solutions have not been viewed as good candidates for a hosted service. Vertical solutions have been offered to tackle industry-specific problems, but the industry has lacked a robust and generic BI capability offered as a service for several reasons. For one, theres a high degree of customization involved in BI implementations. This level of customization has historically been necessary to account for the particulars of company data and to ensure adequate performance when dealing with large data volumes, especially historical data repositories.

Additionally, companies have experienced difficulties integrating multiple BI solutions in a hosted platform. Most solutions use multiple products sourced from different vendors (presentation layer, database, ETL, etc.) to comprise their holistic BI platform. Hosting one or more components is difficult since they would need to closely interface with other components. Nevertheless, there are many reasons why the market has recently seen greater acceptance of SaaS BI solutions. As a result of acquisitions and the gradual maturity of vendor product lines, there are more single-source BI solution stacks and partnered solutions allowing for easier customization and simpler integration. With more integrated and mature products, companies are now able to leverage flexible back-end databases with front-end visualization tools in a hosted solution.

Some of the best reasons for choosing our BI consultants include:

•     Independent assessment of plans, practices, and status.
•     Mentoring and educating the team
•     Leveraging experience across sectors or markets to bring best practices to a project
•     Providing specialized knowledge transfer
•     Help in selecting the right methodology and architecture
•     Crafting clear requirements and performing proper data analysis
•     Assessing infrastructure and server sizing
•     Performance benchmarks
•     Choosing the right data model
•     Selecting suitable algorithms for analytical processing
•     Project Management