Mid Market BI Solutions Gaining Favor With Large Enterprises

In a market of tight investment parameters and little tolerance of mistakes, businesses are seeking out greater transparency and insight into their performance, and they want it NOW. This is leading many large organizations to put aside their current plans for large scale BI implementations and instead seek out mid market solutions – either on-premise or on-demand.

Mid-market Solutions

Small and mid-sized companies already take advantage of business intelligence without paying high prices or needing to have a strong internal IT infrastructure, driven by:

• Ease of use
• Quick implementation times
• Lower total cost of ownership [TCO]
• Diversity in deployment methods and licensing
• Broader payment structures and lower price points

Most midmarket solutions [on-premise and on-demand] are designed to provide end users with the ability to customize and change how they view and analyze data. This means the solutions are typically more intuitive, aimed to support end users who do not have access to internal IT staff. Within a short time, some end users even move beyond customization to develop new applications.

Enterprise BI Solutions

The ability to apply mid-market strategy and solutions to enterprise organizations is becoming a valuable choice as a first step to BI competence. Organizations are no longer willing to invest time in high investment, longer implementation time projects – they just don’t have the time, money and resources required in order to develop a full scale in-house BI and data warehousing application/toolset. They are looking for rapid payback in both productivity and profitability, meaning:

• Deployments in hours or days rather than weeks or months
• Measurable performance improvements
• The ability to update and change information required at a quicker rate than when dealing with internal IT departments
• Custom focused solutions to meet specific departmental or operational needs

Traditional business intelligence is still perceived to lack flexibility, so that cut down features typifying on-demand solutions are no longer such an issue. Lower cost and low maintenance solutions present new opportunities to offer BI as a service and/or with low cost subscription fees can take advantage of this market because they already have the structure in place to implement solutions quickly.

Organizations don’t need the difficult to obtain on-premise expertise, and ongoing support is a fraction of the cost of large-scale implementations. They still get the same basic features and functionality of traditional BI counterparts.

With the typical large enterprise having disparate data silos supporting departments or single processes, BI on Demand solutions can be deployed at this level without the constraint of needing complex data integration at the enterprise level. Whilst this approach fails to meet some key BI principles such as a ‘single version of truth’, the alternative of having no BI capability is no longer acceptable.

Overall, adopting mid market solutions now means that each department can interact with their BI capability independently, developing applications that best suit their requirements, and manage their own data sets, whilst still sharing accurate and relevant data across the organization. Care must be taken that this independence does not deepen the existing ‘silo’ mentality currently existing in many large organizations, and that tools and processes are available to collaborate and share data across the organization.

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