The rise of cloud-based BI solutions (And the demise of on-premise?)

Joanne Nelson, VP International Marketing for Logicalis Global, assesses the future of business intelligence solutions, as research suggests on-premise solutions may soon be consigned to history.

As the business intelligence (BI) market reaches $13 billion, IT leaders searching for new solutions are increasingly choosing cloud-based tools to analyse their operations.

And they are doing so for good reason. BI solutions with their roots in the cloud consistently receive higher satisfaction scores, and often cost less to implement when everything is said and done.  Indeed, the latest BI research suggests the days of on-premise solutions are numbered.

Key findings include:

• 54% of IT leaders would choose a cloud-based BI solution for a new environment, against just 14% who would prefer on-premise
• 80% of those who choose cloud BI are satisfied with their service, versus only 51% who are satisfied with their on-premise solution
• Cloud has a definite speed advantage: 83% of respondents say they can implement cloud BI faster, against only 4% for on-premise
• Cloud also has a cost edge, with 68% of cloud BI implementations coming in at, or below, expected costs, while 54% of on-premise solutions met their cost expectations (this means nearly half of on-premise implementations exceeded cost estimates)
• 44% said on-premise requires more user training, versus just 5% who think cloud needs more training for employees to learn
• On-premise solutions also lag behind in frequency of use, with 51% saying that cloud BI is accessed more often by more employees, against just 18% for on-premise
• Predictably, not one respondent said on-premise was better for mobile accessibility.

All this begs the question – when will we reach a tipping point in on-premise versus cloud BI solutions?  If we are already at a stage where just 14% of CIOs prefer on-premise, how long will it be before choosing on-premise becomes an investment in a dying technology?

 The figures suggest the answer to that question is “not long at all.”