Companies like Greenplum, Neteeza and Asterdata are eating into Oracle's and Teradata marketshare, in the same way that you have seen the open source apps, Jaspersoft and Pentaho gaining inroads vs. Microstrategy, BO, and Cognos. I suspect with PivotLink's 100% SaaS approach you will see this trend continue as fatigued IT execs scramble to move from under the burden of their existing BI contracts and more importantly, their resource abusing BI platforms.

Fahed: I think you make Ajay's point when you say "difficulty and risk associated in trying to find PivotLink professionals" as PivotLink does not require a "professional" to administrate or operate. I am looking forward to this paradigm shift in BI. Bring it on!

Bob Jones,
A twice burned BI deployer

Disclaimer: Also with Business Objects OnDemand

With all due respect, to classify Business Objects BI OnDemand (the "full solution" that Timo references) as the "same Business Objects product, just hosted" is a gross mischaracterization.

BI OnDemand was specifically created to address the challenges to which Dennis refers. I.E. ~ making BI simpler, faster, easier and less costly to deploy.
Furthermore, Business Objects OnDemand is leading the way in SaaS BI with many paying customers.

Yes, BI OnDemand does leverage our best of breed, industry proven B.I. tools for certain components. But our approach is to offer the best of both worlds: Industry proven, best of breed B.I. capability delivered via the SaaS model. Our customers have chosen us because we can offer them the long-term stability of an industry leader with the cutting edge benefits that SaaS provides.

Dennis ~ You may be interested to know that, while many of our BI OnDemand customers are SMB's, we have also deployed BI OnDemand at some very large companies. In my opinion SaaS B.I. can be a fit in organizations of any size. I'd be happy to arrange for a presentation of this solution if that is of interest.

Full disclosure, I work for Business Obects in our Ondemand group.

Aaron Mittler

With all due respect CRDC (crystalreports . com) is not the equivalent of http://www.pivotlink.com. Far from it. The CRDC website clearly says "Crystal Reports (sold separately)". You create a report in desktop software called Crystal Reports (if you get past the 600 page manual) and then you upload it to CRDC to share so that end users may not have to install Crystal Reports on their desktops. CRDC is just a report sharing service and not a full BI stack – which is what you allude to when you mention the other "Full on-demand solution".

That said, this "full on-demand solution" is exactly what AccMan complained against – the same Business Objects product – just hosted. PivotLink has production customers doing heavy duty BI modeling billions of rows of complex data from multiple sources and presenting self-service ad-hoc report creating and sharing capabilities to hundreds of business users – with enterprise grade security. All On-Demand. Check out the REI case study (http://www.pivotlink.com/customers/rei) as an exmaple.

My experience working with customers over the last decade has been that business users still struggle with simple challenges – like creating their own reports or their own calculations. The traditional BI vendors have buried simple capabilities in complex interfaces, have created thousand page manuals and expensive training programs. It is not just the mid-market that needs simplicity – users in big companies need simplicity too.

That is why we are terming our service Business Analytics to get away from the stigma of BI. When it comes to aggregating data, presenting and sharing the analysis, we do the job simply, affordably and quickly. Our users love us because we offer self-service capabilities and unburden IT from mundane tasks and help them refocus on important issues like data quality, secure access and cross-departmental coordination.

Over time the SaaS BI tools will rival Cognos and others in terms of having very hardcore capabilities. I know that we already have some of those functions at AnalytixOnDemand.

However, we are being very cautious (as are our competitors) on how we construct our interfaces to try and keep them as simple as possible.