Although organisations are embracing business intelligence (BI) software, they are struggling to make their solutions more robust, easily accessible, and effective. Cloud-based business intelligence solutions help organisations, irrespective of their sizes, to grow their level of competency and value. Cloud BI is the merger of cloud computing and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) that delivers simpler data predictive models, visualisations, multi-source data discovery etc. In 2018, the global BI software market was valued at $14.3 billion and is expected to grow at 19.1% CAGR to reach $28.77 billion by 2022.

Given that cloud BI is rapid growing, here are some of the most important reasons as to why you should adopt BI in your company:

Reducing Implementation Time

The traditional business intelligence implementation has always been time-consuming. A decade ago, implementation of BI solutions required customisation of software and dedicated hardware for deployment. These, along with the time required in personnel training, consumed a lot of time to complete. However, with the advent of cloud BI solutions, the process has rather become less expensive and quick. With implementing cloud BI tools, one can concentrate more on their core business activities without the need for setting up software, environment, licensing etc. The service provider is responsible for hosting, managing, and maintaining the software, which reduces money, time and other resources.

Advanced Mobility And Higher Adoption

Cloud business intelligence helps the decision-makers stay connected to the consumers in real-time. The decision-makers are in touch with the users 24×7 and 365 days. This enables efficient collaboration, decision making, and establishes much-needed communication. The decision-makers and team can access a cloud BI platform from anywhere in the world without having to think about accessibility issues, proximity, effectiveness and system speed.

Another important factor for the cloud-based business intelligence solutions is because of the rise in cloud adoption. Cloud fulfils a company’s requirements for storing the colossal amount of data that they collect from different sources. This naturally has increased the amount of data on the cloud, which is analysed using BI SaaS. Cloud-based business intelligence platforms also enable the creation and replication of different views based on hierarchy, roles, and geography of the decision-makers.

Scalability

Scalability is the ability to make a software application available for use to those who need it anywhere. Scalable applications help in increasing users’ adoption with ease with the changing requirements. Scalability on top of adoption may also increase the user engagement time in self-service activities. Cloud BI solutions offer scalability beyond this definition. One can also decrease or increase their system and storage quickly ensuring that one pays only for what they need or use. This guarantees that the users have better functionality at a fair price.

Reliability

The cloud-based business intelligence solutions provide excellent reliability and improve through multiple redundant platforms like Birst, Domo, Tableau Online etc. These platforms provide reliable and secure locations for data storage, and the resources can be accessed by many users around the world. The vendors also take care aspects like redundancy, scalability and distribution of the platform.

Lower Cost

The cloud BI solutions include powerfully built data analytics and reporting tools for businesses to upgrade sales and marketing activities. These tools also increase collaborative campaigns between sales and marketing teams of the company. Cloud business intelligence solutions generate maximum business value by enabling employees with self-service analytics, providing IT with the scalability and flexibility it needs to reduce maintenance and security costs. This allows IT departments to concentrate more on innovative solutions and systems that drive significant business growth.

As far as the customers go, because of the cloud-based BI solutions, in research, they mentioned that they were able to reduce demands on IT while moving to cost-effective and scalable solutions.

Some cloud BI solutions you can choose from apart from the popular ones like Tableau Online, Microsoft Power BI:

ThoughtSpot: Offers an AI-driven analytics platform and combines relational search with a custom-built, in-memory relational data cache to speed up queries. ThoughtSpot connects any on-premise, cloud, big data, or desktop data source and has introduced its new voice-activated analytics interface called SearchIQ.

Periscope Data: IT takes advantage of augmented analytics revolution. It provides new visual data discovery capabilities and allows business users with direct access to cleaned data sets. 
Reltio: This platform allows businesses to manage data by making use of continuous data organisation and recommended actions. It offers a Self-Learning Data Platform that organises data from a wide variety of sources and formats to create a data set that has personalised views of users across business departments.

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