SMB customers have already adopted Tier 2 ERP packages as Software as A Service (SaaS) and are running their business critical processes. They are benefiting from lower costs, and flexibility to ramp up or down IT resources with the business.

The question that comes to mind is whether or not, large enterprises are ready to adopt ERP on a SaaS mode. More specifically, are large customers who have traditionally bought software licenses and installed it on-premise, willing to buy SAP or Oracle software on a subscription basis from the software vendors or service providers?

Lately, service providers have been offering Infrastructure as a Utility for SAP and Oracle applications. It seems but a natural extension for service providers to offer the Application itself as a Utility on a Pay as You go/subscription model. Customers would be happy to shift their application expenditure from CAPEX to OPEX.

If you have any thoughts on the readiness of large enterprises to embrace ERP on a SaaS model, please comment and share your ideas with us.

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Due to the proliferation of data, there is a need for enterprises to gain insights to make better decisions.  Companies are good in acquiring data over a period of years but poor in transforming that into meaningful information.  BI (Business Intelligence) isn’t just reporting anymore.

Customers are demanding more BI capabilities beyond traditional query/reporting and OLAP functionality, to leverage innovation and growth arising from in-memory analytics, & service-oriented architecture. The longer term BI strategy should also include building strong Datawarehouse with powerful ETL capabilities and flexible data modeling and more importantly presentation layer comprising of KPIs/Dashboards i.e. capable of deploying globally via. web portals. This might include rationalization of multiple tools and vendors to make “One stop – One vision … One truth”.  Ability to consolidate and report at enterprise level (globally) is a challenge due to existence of silo reporting solutions that were delivered from various platforms using different tools.  This opened the door for Enterprise BI initiatives and made customers reach out to vendors with enterprise wide BI capabilities and tools.  Vendor consolidation has happened and we see end to end solutions from major vendors (SAP Business objects, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft) in BI today than before.

What we have also seen clearly is that the focus and reach of BI has shifted from operational, tactical to more strategic i.e. how to Run the business in the past Vs Drive the business now. The increasing trend towards Service oriented architecture and Self service BI,  BI Standardization, Platform agnostic solutions and BI on cloud is the way to go….

This is a long journey and it may take years to adopt an Enterprise BI strategy. It needs clear vision, executive support, governance process, efficient change management, and last but not least ‘selecting right platform/application’.

We want to hear your views on adopting Enterprise wide BI strategy starting from assessment of current architecture, understand business KPIs, building roadmap, setting up BI Competency center, and selecting the right platform.

In my next blog, I will talk more about establishing a BI Center of Excellence, levels of maturity in BI, and importance of Data architecture & governance in this entire journey.

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The cloud is on everyone’s mind today. At Intelligroup, we seek to decipher the hype from the reality, and bring clarity to the various avatars of the cloud–Software as A Service (SaaS), Platform As a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure As a Service (IaaS), or Business Process As a Service.

We hosted a recent customer event in San Jose, California where the theme was cloud computing, and attendees shared how they are actually using the cloud. Some have their SAP application server on the cloud while others have deployed Oracle CRM on Demand or salesforce.com. Yet others, especially the larger enterprises are leveraging Infrastructure as a Cloud, and tapping into the compute and storage capacity of Amazon Web Services. However, speakers emphasized the security and data management risks. and the need to have a comprehensive cloud strategy before embarking on this journey.

 We want to hear from you as to how you view the cloud; where it fits in with your IT architecture/strategy, and how you have deployed it. If you have taken a flight to the cloud, we encourage you to share your experience with your peers–the benefits, costs, and risks involved.

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