- SAP Managed Tags:
Ian, marketing head of ABC Corp wants to penetrate into new markets and produce exponential results. He calls out to his secretary, Linda, to check if she can come up with a report. Linda pulls up data from their corporate database and produces long excel sheets, pie charts after a day long effort. The report supports what Ian wanted but the next thing which props up his mind is the cost factor behind each marketing gimmick. He wishes he had any On-Demand application to plug-in to his corporate database and helps him with classy dashboards to drill-in, pivot, and slice & dice.
Ian is one of the growing leagues of entrepreneurs targeting big with sprouting ideas and shallow pockets. They need quick, robust, simple with (most importantly) lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) solution to their analysis requirements. And this is the future of Analysis i.e. On Demand
What exactly is On Demand??
On Demand terminology found its place in the technology world with the introduction of capability to make anything available, anywhere, anytime!!! On Demand relies on the capabilities of Cloud Computing and its implementation to real world.
Business Analysis
Every business heads out in the market with a goal and a timeline to achieve it. Analyzing whether business is On-track or Off-track, analysts need quantifiable indicators identified as Key Performance Indicators (KPI). A company with a target to achieve $1B mark would have Revenues as its KPI while a company with target to be more profitable would analyze Sales to Expenses ratio.
For Ian (above) Sales per channel, Expenses per channel, Profit Margin per channel, Conversion ratios are Key Indicators to take profitable decision to penetrate into new markets with minimal cost of marketing.
Marrying Business Analysis with Cloud Computing
Ian’s wish to have a quick and simple solution to build reports for his analysis is possible with combination of Cloud computing and Business Analysis. With BI software deployed over cloud, Ian can plug-in the cloud based software to its in-house database to publish reports and dashboards which can be further shared with others and available anytime over the internet. He can carry out detailed analysis of marketing channels to deduce the more effective and least expensive mode.
Drivers for Cloud based BI
A business is all about numbers, analyzed in terms of Balance sheets and thus drive the decision of opting any new technology. Some of the factors which drive such PoVs are:
Total Cost of Ownership: Hardware/software procurement cost, deployment /implementation cost are nil for end users as these services are available On Demand. End users need to just pay for the service with a freedom to scrap it anytime in future.
Ease of publishing: The easy it is for an analyst to publish reports, the more popular is the software. Ease of producing quick non-complex reports makes analysts their own master
Organization size: With new startups making their way into the mainstream business, big investments on in-premise software makes a big hole in their pockets. Small and mid-sized organizations tend to incline towards low cost solutions and cloud based solutions caters to their needs
Data Source Connectivity: Ability to plug-in to on premise data sources like files, spreadsheets, relational databases gives more popularity to build on demand reports
Cloud based Integration Solutions: Cloud based analysis gives birth to cloud based integration solution enabling data manipulations, combining multiple origins, transformations on the cloud and connect to reporting solutions
