Business intelligence SaaS goes to SME

More than 20 years ago, Gartner put forward the concept of business intelligence and defined it as "a kind of technology and application that consists of data Warehouse, query report, data analysis, data mining and so on to help enterprise decision-making". Technically speaking, business intelligence is a comprehensive application of data Warehouse, OLAP and data mining technology, which can effectively integrate existing data, provide reports and decision basis quickly and accurately, and help enterprises make informed business Operation management decisions.

In foreign countries, business intelligence has been widely recognized by all walks of life, SAP, Oracle and other large companies ' products basically occupy most of the business intelligence software market, its functions are integrated into the ERP, CRM and other modules. Many large enterprises in China are also beginning to enjoy the great benefits brought by business intelligence. But for many small and medium-sized enterprises, the use of business intelligence software has been taking a wait-and-see attitude. First of all, its high cost plus configuration and later maintenance costs have made it difficult for many enterprises to bear. Secondly, most of these foreign software systems are complex, requiring the professional training of business personnel to learn to get started, which increases the cost of training. Even if the final purchase of these software, because it is difficult to compatible with other applications, data resources can not be fully utilized, low cost.

However, in today's customer-first era, enterprises want to further develop, it must be recognized that enterprise data analysis and insight is to drive the growth of enterprises cited as a beacon, the existing data must be fast real-time processing in order to guide the subsequent decision-making operation.

In response to this dilemma, enterprises are not at their wits ' back and second choice of business intelligence SaaS System can also realize the intelligent benefits of enterprise data. It should adopt the innovation mode of platform + module, avoid the enterprise to build server and install software, just use the shared service provided by the platform, which is the so-called "service" mode. This approach is flexible and open, enterprises can customize the required function modules according to their own needs, enjoy customized business intelligence services, which can greatly reduce the cost of information construction, to help SMEs embark on the road of business intelligence.

In view of such a kind of business intelligence system, the author believes that SMEs should meet the following requirements:

1, a unified platform system.

At present, many business intelligence software presents multi-architecture, multi-component features, design and interface isolation. But for the small and medium-sized enterprises because of its complexity, learning and management difficult, for its business status is not high. The Business intelligence SaaS system for small and medium enterprises can adopt unified data management, application framework and user management. The information access of each application platform can be implemented in a system to adapt to the status quo of small and medium enterprises overall it level is not strong.

2. Easy to implement and easy to use.

Considering the limitations of the capital and manpower cost of small and medium-sized enterprises, the business people should be able to use business intelligence to get started quickly, which requires business intelligence can avoid the original manual data integration and related work, provide a kind of drag-and-drop interface, so that ordinary users can reduce the cost of learning, self-service analysis.

3. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

With a service-oriented architecture, you can mask the differences between different platforms, programming languages, operating systems, and hardware architectures for simple integration of applications. This also allows the flexibility of the I-t system to be improved as never before, and development costs are reduced. The choice of service-oriented architecture can make the business intelligence SaaS system more easy to integrate with the existing ERP system, and build a personalized enterprise information portal.

4. Powerful Data analysis technology

Data analysis is the foundation, in order to adapt to the rapid development of enterprise demand, business intelligence needs to do fast, consistent, interactive access to data, support complex analysis operations. Taking Finebl as an example, its cube data storage can be used to achieve full data timing and incremental update, which has the ability to avoid repeated calculation of the cache mechanism, to avoid the continuous extraction of data input time consumption.

5. Smooth and rich visualization experience

The OLAP of Business Intelligence SaaS System is a multi-dimensional analysis technology based on BI, which can enable the managers and decision-makers of enterprises to conduct self-service query analysis. Users can explore the value of data from a multidimensional, all-around relationship. In terms of data presentation, in addition to the basic charting, GIS map integration, Dashbord technology and HTML 5 Embedded development technology can improve the visualization function, and add a lot to the enterprise application.

In the current era, business intelligence is the only way for enterprises to develop in the future, the SaaS system because of its business agility, strengthen the competitive advantage and customer interaction characteristics can quickly release the power of data in enterprise applications, its utility will affect the enterprise optimization operations in all aspects, which is critical to the next wave of business innovation

Business intelligence SaaS goes to SME