Industry analysts expect business analytics software-as-a-service (SaaS) to grow three times faster than the traditional business analytics software market. The prime reason for this increased enthusiasm for cloud-based BI and analytics solutions is their ability to speed up the delivery of actionable analytics to business users.

Businesses of all sizes can leverage vast computing and storage resources in the cloud without having to invest in expanding the existing IT footprints. From getting started to getting real business value, takes just a few hours and requires zero IT infrastructure changes, hardware, software or professional services.

Cloud BI is also highly scalable, and can be easily accessed by authorized business users across the value chain. The cloud can provide accurate, real-time analytics to everyone in the organization and its ecosystem – from executive suites to the frontline business users; all without setting up servers, defining metrics or writing code. In addition, cloud based BI offers organizations a dramatic increase in agility and efficiency. Users in all corners of the enterprise can take advantage of brilliantly simple, yet incredibly powerful analytics apps; without burdening IT.

Real-time analytics and report customization by Business Users
Cloud based BI applications provide business users an out-of-the-box analytics with pre-defined metrics and simple data models that can easily be understood by non-experts. Additionally, cloud BI provides the environment to create, customize, share and publish dashboard metrics in minutes, without IT help, thus enabling decision-makers to act quickly on fast-changing market conditions.

Interactive platform for collaborative analytics and better decision making
Cloud-based BI tools also provide an easy way for business users to share dashboards, reports and metrics and work as a group to improve performance measures. Collaborative analytics can play a vital role in report standardization across the enterprise, and enabling business users to have a ‘single source of truth’ to answer business questions. Such collaborative capabilities enable business users to share insights and solicit ideas from users within the business or with external partners. All this can help business users to:

• Drive goal alignment and consensus, to make better decisions based on their organization’s collective intelligence
• Create stores for information and communication that span the entire supply chain
• Eliminate the need to complile and email static spread sheets and reports.

Cloud based analytics help companies leverage data stored in enterprise systems, such as SAP, rapidly turning it into actionable dashboards, reports and metrics for business users. Additionally, Cloud BI is collaborative, enabling co-workers, suppliers and partners to have a single source of truth that’s always up-to-date.