The hype and the rush to provide cloud functionality might have led some resellers selling business intelligence to believe that this was the year the technology shifted to delivery via hosted platforms.
But the portion of the BI market that will be taken by cloud sales is going to remain under double digits for the next couple of years.
According to the latest analysis of the BI market from Gartner the move to the cloud in this sector of the software market is turning out to be a slow one with just 3% of revenue coming from hosted offerings by 2013.
Despite that relatively small growth every major vendor is expected to have a cloud offering and as a result resellers are going to be encouraged to start pitching those products.
Part of the reason for the apparent delay in heading to the cloud is because a lot of customers have already made investments in on-premise BI solutions and are reluctant to tinker with existing infrastructure.
"The immediate future of the BI landscape is one of a disconnect between marketing hype about pressing challenges on the one hand and reality on the other," said Andreas Bitterer, research vice president at Gartner.
2011 was undoubtedly the year that cloud computing went “mainstream”, but for highly established technology practices, such as business intelligence, adopting such a strategy was and is always going to be a struggle. Attempting to introduce an entirely new strategy alongside technology, that some organisations will have had in place for years, naturally requires a great deal of attention and, for some, may seem insurmountable. However, despite these low predictions by Gartner, organisations are able to turn to newer technologies to help with this adoption. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is emerging as a preferred cloud strategy for enterprise application development. It provides many benefits including improved cost, deployment speed, scalability, but most importantly, ease of implementation and maintenance. According to industry analysts, it will become a $12 billion market by 2020. The combination of the advent of PaaS and this prediction by Gartner should actually serve as an opportunity for businesses – if others are struggling, there is the genuine chance to implement a cloud strategy before others get to grips with it.
Evanna Kearins, Director EMEA