Founder of the SaaS Showplace web site, THINKstrategies has an award program to recognize SaaS companies who are delivering solutions which produce measurable business benefits for their customers, including increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand has just been named the latest winner of the award:

SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand is an intuitive, turnkey business intelligence solution that allows business people with no prior experience to explore, report and share information inside or outside the company. Because it’s on demand, SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand can be acquired and setup in minutes, without a long technology project. It’s available standalone or can integrate with existing on-premise or on-demand investments, delivering improved productivity and greater insight for more informed decision making.

A company experiencing the business benefits of SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand is GENBAND, a Texas-based global supplier of next-generation IP infrastructure that also uses Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Angie Reese, GENBAND’s CRM application manager was looking for a business intelligence solution that would provide GENBAND with greater analytic capabilities and insight about its customers. By adopting SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand, GENBAND has been able to generate powerful reports that can be more easily shared across its organization. The automated report-generation capabilities have saved GENBAND a minimum of eight to 10 hours per week in staff time. It has also been able to improve GENBAND’s sales tracking and customer service capabilities as the company grew rapidly from approximately 400 to 2,200 employees.

It is for these reasons that SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand has been named a Best of SaaS Showplace Award winner.

A video of Angie talking about her experiences is available in the customer area of the OnDemand.com web site:

You can sign up for a free account and try BusinessObjects BI OnDemand at http://bi.ondemand.com

[UPDATED]. Apologies. This used to be a quick, irreverent overview of the brand-new cloud-based, software-as-a-service ERP offering from SAP, featuring the graphics you can see above.

But the video was declared off-brand, and has been deleted from YouTube by SAP. The following video is offered instead, with all of the original humor deleted.

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is the first analysis tool that I’ve seen that I can honestly say is intuitive enough to use without any training (see http://microfinance.sap.com to prove it to yourself).

If you’d like to know more about the product, list of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about SAP BusinessObjects Explorer” in a previous post.

This post is about the http://explorer.ondemand.com web site that lets you easily upload any Excel spreadsheet and start analyzing, for free, without having to install any software, and the updated version of the Explorer in the Cloud prototype that has just been released by the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center.

New Features

The new version uses the latest interface of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer XI 3.1 SP1, and adds two key functionalities asked for by early users:

Analysis bookmarking. Once you’ve discovered something in the data, you can now easily send that view of the data to somebody else. You simply click on the “Email” button, you’ll be prompted whether the view should be password-protected, and whether you’d like it to be a permanent bookmark. For example, you may want to make a breakdown of product sales permanently available to the marketing team.

Replace dataset. The new version lets you replace an existing data set with an updated one without disturbing any existing links or bookmarks.

And, of course, you can still easily export the analysis as a data set or image:

“Drinking our Own Champagne”

The solution is not yet available externally on the http://explorer.ondemand.com website, but since we’re big believers in “drinking our own champagne”, it has already been made available internally to all 48,500+ SAP employees as part of the standard internal portal.

Feedback has been extremely positive across all communities and geographies, with hundreds of sessions every day. Here’s one feedback, about a typically pragmatic information need (paraphrased and translated from the original):

“I’m in a technical team. Each region created a spreadsheet containing information about the skills and levels of their local team members. Using the internal Explorer solution, it was easy to consolidate the different spreadsheets, upload them, analyze the data to spot areas we needed to work on, and get the information into PowerPoint so we could share it with others!”

Excel Plug-in and API

An Excel 2007 and 2003 Add-in is available that lets you send information directly from your spreadsheet environment – select the data you want to look at and you can start analyzing just two clicks later.

Finally, an API for Explorer in the Cloud is also available – think about ways you or your organization could ship information directly into the cloud for easy analysis!

If you’d like to know more about Explorer, here’s a new promotion page that gives you links to the latest resources about Explorer.

SAP today announced new collaboration agreements that allow SAP Business ByDesign users to more easily leverage web services from third-party providers, including:

Business and investment news. Users can access investment research and other data from Hoover’s, Morningstar, and Business Wire, Google News, and Google Finance, and combine it with their own information about customers and suppliers.

Mapping and address services. Users can map and route customers, suppliers and other contacts using services from Google Maps, MapQuest.com, Navteq/Map24, and Falk online.

Search. Users can leverage Google Web Search, and Google Product Search, and GoYellow.de, a German service that allows reverse phone lookup functionality.

Further web services are planned to be introduced in the next release of Business By Design in Q3 of 2009.

Frustratingly, no information was available about the extent of integration with these services, and how customers could proceed. As Chris Kanaracus reported in his article SAP adds Web Services to Business by Design:

It wasn’t immediately clear how deep the integrations are between the services and BBD. This is a key point, said Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang.

Just being able to call out to Google Maps from within the ERP suite has limited value, Wang said. But if the system could use sales data contained in BBD to create a “heat map” showing the hottest territories, “that would be pretty cool,” he said.

At some point more information may be available on Web Services area of the Business ByDesign marketplace (registration required). For now, it contains roughly the information as the press release.

According to the company web site, on-demand BI vendor LucidEra was formed:

“to shake up the stagnant business intelligence industry and traditional approaches to corporate information access and analysis by delivering business visibility as an on-demand service.”

And LucidEra has indeed been innovative, developing deep expertise in the area of Sales Pipeline analytics with a 48h Pipeline Healthcheck service that in the words of Phil Wainwright, aims to “deliver return *before* investment”:

“In just 48 hours the LucidEra Pipeline Healthcheck will identify opportunities and risks in your sales forecast. We’ll analyze the health of your pipeline, sales people, and overall sales process to help identify ways to increase revenues, decrease pipeline risk, and get more predictable sales results. Plus, we’ll provide an interactive analysis so you can dig deeper into the results. We’ll quantify the results of our findings and show you the impact that on-going business intelligence as a service can have on your sales revenues.”

But unfortunately it looks like the storm clouds may be gathering for the company. This weekend, LucidEra’s Founder and CMO Ken Rudin informed friends and colleagues that:

“my email address is changing and I am no longer using the email address krudin@lucidera.com”

And now competitor GoodData has put out a press release claiming that LucidEra is “offering to sell its intellectual property after almost four years of operations” and announcing a “program to offer existing LucidEra customers free access to its innovative on-demand analytics service” with six months of free access to applications.

There has been no confirmation (or denial) from LucidEra so far [update: see below]. If indeed it is the end of an era, there will inevitably be a post-mortem discussion of what factors led to the company’s problems, and what it says about the on-demand BI market in general – particularly since various surveys and analyst postings at the start of this year predicted a rosy future for business intelligence software as a service in 2009.

The current rumor is that the company’s problems are primarily a result of bad timing, with the company needing another round of financing in a tough market, despite good products and pipeline.

My position has always been that on-demand business intelligence is an essential part of the market, but that some of the claimed benefits have been over-hyped.

In particular, I don’t think the debate should be about about choosing between on-demand and on-premise: customers should be able to seamlessly and easily move between one and the other according to their needs, using the same technology platform. This has been the position with SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence on-demand offering (www.ondemand.com), that use the standard BusinessObjects platform, in the cloud, on a multi-tenancy platform.

In the meantime, let me point out that Darren Cunningham, LucidEra’s excellent VP of Marketing writes an interesting, entertaining, and valuable “Keep it Simple” blog, and Darren just posted the list of all-time most popular posts:

1. 9 Holes of Sales Analytics Best Practices
2. Sales Analytics for the Board of Directors
3. What is Your Data Actually Telling You?
4. SaaS BI – Analytic Aspirin in a Difficult Economy?
5. What’s in Store for Business Intelligence in 2008
6. Guest Blogger Alert – The LucidEra Opportunity
7. We Couldn’t Get the Answers
8. Everything is a Platform
9. What’s in Store for Business Intelligence in 2009
10. Transforming Marketing’s Traditional 4 P’s into SaaS’s 5 A’s
11. Take the SaaS BI Survey
12. Sales 2.0 Data Points and Anecdotes
13. Using Analytics to Avoid Wasting Time
14. The Call for Basic Numeracy
15. What is an Analytic Application?
16. What is Cloud Computing?
17. IDC Predictions for 2009
18. Ashe on SaaS
19. A Visionary Who Thinks Clouds will Cloud His Vision
20. The Power of Pie Charts

I wish all the best of luck to Ken, Darren, other employees and customers of LucidEra…

Update: the rumor is now confirmed:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) provider LucidEra will cease operations by the end of this month, a company executive has confirmed.

The vendor sent an email to customers on Thursday with the news and pledged to help customers wind down their relationship with the company and its SaaS-based BI products by the end of June, said Darren Cunningham, vice president of marketing at LucidEra, in a phone interview.

LucidEra’s decision to shutdown was brought about by a lack of funding, not a lack of interest in its products or in SaaS BI on the whole, Cunningham said. He would not go into details regarding LucidEra’s financial problems other than to say, “It was a matter of funding or being acquired. And neither of those things happened.”

LucidEra’s prepackaged BI reports focus primarily on Salesforce.com-based data. The company’s last round of funding came nearly two years ago in August 2007, when it raised $15.6 million in Series B funding, according to LucidEra’s website.

Now the SAP BusinessObjects Lab team have introduced a preview of Polestar OnDemand that allows you to upload any data set you like and then interactively browse through the information. It’s part of an overall approach to combine the best of on-premise and SAAS BI into a single combined solution.

I decided to play with the solution, and within a few minutes, I was able to check one of the stories in Malcom Gladwell’s book, "Outliers: The Story of Success" (well worth reading). Early in the book, he notes that your chances of becoming a successful professional hockey player are hugely determined by what month you were born in — kids born in January tend to be bigger than their classmates and score more goals, which results in more motivation, more coaching, and ultimately more success.

I took the sample spreadsheet, augmented it slightly to add birth quarter, and then let Polestar OnDemand suck up the spreadsheet. To my delight, when I chose "games played" as a measure of professional success, it immediately worked out that the most important influencing variable was birth quarter, with the graphic below showing a perfect correlation with birth quarter and number of games!

Further exploration showed that it turns out that you get roughly the same results whether you use "goals scored", "points", or the other available measures (presumably because these are highly correlated with games played).

I think Polestar is a great solution made even greater OnDemand — but I’m biased. See if you think the same — watch the video (2:30 minutes), and take a look at http://polestar.ondemand.com

Notes:

1. It’s only on a small server so far — don’t be surprised if it’s slow or unresponsive when you try and use it
2. When uploading, make sure you click on the letters "GO" — the rest of the button is unresponsive

With an easy-on-the-eyes flex-based interface, the store is designed to sell information on line that can be used to supplement internal data. Along with the Thomson Financial and Dun & Bradstreet sources already announced, the store features information from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and… the eBay marketplace.

Courtesy of Advanced Economic Research Systems, inc., the eBay information is “accurate, up-to-date information based on over 6 billion consumer purchasing decisions from the over 240 million consumers that buy and sell on eBay’s global platform.” Models available in the new store include a Crystal Xcelsius model for state-to-state comparison of MP3 players by brand and a top 10 product comparison using Crystal Reports.

The rise of MP3 players is perhaps an apt analogy for the information on demand market. MP3 players had existed for quite a while before Apple came along with the easy-to-use iPod and unleashed the “everyday consumer” market. It achieved this by centralizing music from several different publishers and introducing revolutionary ease of use. And Apple managed it despite more obvious candidates, such as Walkman-pioneer Sony, because of misaligned incentives (Sony’s music division saw MP3 players as a threat, not an opportunity).

Information on demand is a market whose time has come. Commercial information has been around a long time, but until now hasn’t taken advantage of modern business intelligent infrastructures to make it easy for organizations to consume that information.

By providing an easy-to-use platform that centralizes information from different publishers, Business Objects is hoping to become the Apple iStore of information. With a large existing customer base, some level of success seems assured, but the real questions are how much new business can be generated, and how much of a head start Business Objects will be allowed before more competitors flood into the market.

The business market is never going to react as fast as consumer markets, but information on demand seems poised for explosive success if the right ingredients come together…

1. On-Demand = Subscription Pricing = Mid-Market

There are three different axes that are often discussed as if they overlapped:

• on-premise vs. on-demand
• perpetual license vs. subscription license
• enterprise vs. mid-market.

On-demand BI is typically subscription-based, aimed primarily at the mid-market, but it’s far from being the only valid combination.  and on-demand BI can’t

Perpetual licenses vs. subscription. On-demand BI isn’t the same thing as subscription pricing. For example, SAS has always charged an annual fee for their on-premise software. Perpetual licenses for a hosted services are rare, but they do exist outside of BI – e.g. lifetime fee offers for hosted web sites.

Enterprise vs mid-market. Mid-market organizations may well be attracted by on-demand options, but the BI vendors are all successfully selling mid-market on-premise packages. In addition, larger organizations are showing interest in hosted BI — although the extra complexity around data sources and customization may mean that it takes a while longer to become popular.

2. On-Demand BI is Cheaper

First, what does “cheap” mean? I haven’t yet found anybody who wanted to pay more for their BI software, but whatever the price there will be some people who can’t afford it (this includes “free”, since it always take effort to set up). According to Gartner, BI is the fastest-increasing investment priority for CIOs in 2007, indicating that BI is considered “cheap” by most organizations — i.e. they see possible benefits that outweigh the price.

On-demand BI is clearly targeting price-sensitive, lower-functionality-requiring customers first. But there’s nothing in the rule book that says that a hosted service has to be cheaper than an on-premise equivalent:

• A major cost component – running the machines — is provided by the vendor. This means that total cost of ownership could be lower, but it also means that vendors could (“should” in a perfectly competitive market) charge higher prices than for equivalent on-premise software.
• On-demand BI that charges subscription fees rather than a perpetual license can be cheaper initially — but more expensive over the long run. And again, subscription pricing is available for on-premise BI.
• Equivalent functionality has to be taken into account — hosted on-demand doesn’t (yet) provide the same level of BI sophistication as on-premise BI, and so doesn’t have the same top-level prices. There’s also a huge market in cheap on-premise BI notably with Crystal Reports (Business Objects) and Microsoft.

3. On-Demand BI is Simpler and Easier to Use

This is a mantra of on-demand offerings, and it has to be true to some extent, or there would be little incentive to implement them, given the cultural misgivings about SAAS in general.

But there’s a certain amount of deliberate confusion between “simple” on-demand solutions (because that’s all that is available, or because the complexity is hidden by the vendor) and “complex” on-premise solutions (nothing says you have to every feature available, or implement it all yourself).

Ease of use: there’s clearly nothing inherently easier about an on-demand interface rather than on-premise interface. In fact, since most of the vendors that currently sell on-premise solutions support both web and full-client access, there’s greater choice (you can do analysis during that transatlantic flight), especially for power users. And two of the vendors that try the hardest to differentiate on ease of use and simplicity provide primarily full-client, on-premise products (Tableau and Qliktech). And Xcelsius, a full-client tool that produces online dashboards, also provides great ease-of-use.

Data integration and data quality: On-demand BI is not a magic wand, sadly. The data isn’t going to integrate itself or spontaneously become error-free. Having an on-demand BI vendor do it for you, on their platform, can certainly make your life easier — but so can a consulting company doing it on your machines. And having pre-built solutions for particular data sources and business uses can help with integration — but that’s also applicable to both on-demand and on-premise

Ease of installation. This is clearly an area where on-demand BI can claim to have an advantage — but not as much as you might think, especially with the introduction of BI appliances and virtual appliances.

4. On-Demand BI is Less Secure

In case I’m accused of being too hard on on-demand BI, here’s a misconception that clearly goes the other way. The perception of security is a cultural and trust issue, not a technological one. Do you keep your money under the mattress — or is it stored “on-demand” in a bank?

There’s no technology differences that accounts for why an organization should trust their funds to the international banking system but not their data to an on-demand BI provider.

Having trust, governance, compliance, or legal concerns is perfectly legitimate, but they are already dealt with on a daily basis with full outsourced IT deployments, so shouldn’t be an issue with on-demand BI.

5. On-Demand BI is Only about Software

A key part of BI 2.0 will be “information on demand” — the ability to easily augment internal data with external benchmarks, such as market share, economic predictions, etc. Note that the information on demand can easily be consumed by either on-demand and on-premise solutions.

6. On-Demand BI is The Future of BI

No, it’s part of the future. It’s not really a choice between on-demand and on-premise — organizations want it all, just like we don’t want to choose between the internet and our PCs (internet appliances were apparently one of the “eight biggest tech flops ever”.)

Despite the silly “no software” slogan (OK, not so silly: it ‘worked’), even Salesforce.com has had to provide offline versions of its products for sales people on the road, and companies can spend lots of time connecting it to their internal systems.

Organizations ultimately want a solution that can be installed on-premise, used on-demand, or any combination in between. With service-oriented architectures, the boundaries between on-demand and on-premise solutions will become increasingly vague. Tomorrow’s BI users will be accessing a seamless combination of web services that are executed on systems inside their organization and systems that are outside their firewalls.

Other resources/articles that illustrate or deal with the points above…

• On-Demand Business Intelligence Solution Lowers To
  tal Cost of Ownership and Risk (does it solve world hunger, too?)
• On-Demand Vendor Strategy
• Business Objects’ on-demand BI
• On-Demand Business Intelligence
• Fear Factor: Business Intelligence as a Hosted Service
• Five Primary Drivers of BI On Demand
• Oracle’s misconceived SaaS strategy