Buy
V
s. Build
Embedding Business Analytics Into SaaS or Cloud Applications
A White Paper
1 Executive Summary 2 Buy, Not Build – Here’s Why
2 Greater Cost Savings and Revenue Opptunities 3 Security and Multi-Tenancy
4 Proving the Model
4 Varolii 4 CDS Global
5 Chrome River Technologies 5 Jobs2Web
5 Unisys 3
7 Information in the Cloud 8 Why Information Builders?
8 New Features
9 Conclusion
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
Everything is cyclical. Decades ago, the computer industry exploded with timesharing and the development of the mainframe, and then shifted to client-server. Today, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing herald a return to timesharing. Corporate entities question the need for in-house IT staff and architecture when they can outsource and save money, resources, and time. Cloud-based applications, such as Salesforce.com, revolutionized the industry with their software-only, no architecture solutions.
Interest in SaaS and cloud offerings at the enterprise level has created a resounding explosion in offerings. First, there is an overwhelming amount of data being captured, stemming from an array of applications including sales, inventory, marketing, loyalty, web, finance, and other systems. Business intelligence (BI) and analytics help organizations transform the volumes of data they produce and collect into a revenue-enhancing resource. Yet, many organizations only scratch the surface when it comes to employing this form of BI, missing opportunities to identify trends, uncover business opportunities, reduce losses, and answer critical business questions.
Capitalizing on the data created by your application – and those of other applications your customers are using – means revenue for you and your customers. Often, however, important information sits untapped instead of being used for driving analytics. The challenge is to increase application revenue through new customers without taxing development resources to satisfy the evolving needs of end users and developments in the marketplace.
SaaS has emerged as a flexible and efficient way to ensure company growth and profitability without requiring major investments in new infrastructure, employee training, or software purchases. More than just a trend, SaaS delivers these and many other benefits to companies that choose it as a replacement for on-site software.
In this paper, we explore the benefits of BI and analytics and provide key reasons why
organizations should buy, not build, these capabilities into Saas applications: lower total cost of ownership (TCO), quick time to value (weeks, not months), and analytics capabilities that you pilot and price to quickly gauge user experience and potential.
Improving application usage, retention, and bottom lines are drivers of incorporating high-ROI analytics into SaaS applications. A recent examination by analyst research firm Nucleus Research found that every dollar organizations spent on BI applications earned back $10.66.1 With this
revenue potential, why would any SaaS vendor spend time, money, and resources building BI applications on their own?
No one knows your application better than your in-house people, so logic dictates leveraging in-house resources to embed BI into your application. Organizations that invest in BI realize its ROI more effectively than any other IT investment – especially via SaaS. Self-service BI frees IT from having to generate reports. Receiving a report via e-mail or opening a web browser is faster than any other means of report delivery.
BI makes more data available to decision-makers and enables them to find ways to increase revenues or reduce costs though improving the availability and flexibility of information. Partnering with the right vendors allows the added BI components to take on the look and feel of your application to ensure a consistent user experience. Partnering also affords you the opportunity to slowly add components, test premium pricing and customer acceptance, and pilot additional features such as predictive and sentiment analytics or performance management. Experienced BI vendors also have extensive expertise with databases and applications, allowing you to integrate any database or application. This array of data availability through pre-built data connectors speeds time to value and usage of your application.
BI quickly proves itself by transforming data into dynamic, relevant information. To accomplish this, it needs to be used and shared by as many employees in as many functions as possible. By providing wide access via web-based reporting, your application will become pervasive throughout customers’ organizations and built into the everyday workflow of numerous users versus just a select group of divisional or management personnel. This increases reliance on your application, customer retention, and revenue stream.
With such high returns to be earned on the deployment of analytics, management teams should consider these technologies to be one of the most attractive investment opportunities available to drive new revenue.
Greater Cost Savings and Revenue Opptunities
Business intelligence can provide a complete, end-to-end reporting and analytics solution within your application. From integrated authentication using industry standards to full report creation
Buy, Not Build – Here’s Why
1. “Research Note: Analytics Pays Back $10.66 for Every Dollar Spent,” Nucleus Research, Inc., November 2011.
A recent examination by analyst research firm Nucleus Research found that every dollar organizations spent on BI applications earned back $10.66.
and design, developers can embed customized reports and dashboards into their applications very quickly. This means that you can add best-of-breed reporting and analytics without having to invest years in its development or maintenance.
When buying a BI solution from a vendor, clients also get the vendor’s expertise while leveraging fully optimized business intelligence capabilities, without worrying about costly, resource-demanding data warehouse or data integration issues. Consumers of these solutions generally require nothing more than a browser. Training, then, is practically unnecessary and user ramp-up time is immediate.
A subscription-based BI cloud solution can provide even further cost savings. Subscription-based solutions allow customers to budget for a regular monthly software payment, and avoid maintenance, upgrade, and server costs. Solution providers have regular, scheduled interactions with clients to ensure smooth operations and consistent maintenance and adjustments.
Solution providers that already offer SaaS and BI enable their clients to expand effective usage at a lower cost and provide the opportunity to revisit existing clients for additional revenue.
Established BI vendors are able to handle issues that impact integration of analytics into applications, including a variety of data volumes (e.g. social media, data models, documents, e-mail, video, still images, audio, financial transactions, data warehouses, and other major data-generating applications) and data velocity (rate at which data is created and analyzed). They will be able to help you quickly differentiate and monetize your reporting capabilities by selectively offering features such as customized reporting, report scheduling, end-user content sharing, and delegated administration. These features will increase your application’s utilization and boost user engagement. Impactful BI helps users break down information silos and creates a culture of sharing information across business lines, collaborate on information’s potential impact, and work to ensure the meeting of corporate goals and objectives. The best solutions will provide robust analytical capabilities for non-technical users. Self-service capabilities for users are paramount, as are customization and process improvement. New aspects of your application shouldn’t impede user productivity by being alien to users. Aligning your goals and design needs with your analytics partner will guarantee user acceptance, ingrain analytics into your users’ everyday behavior, and meet your application standards.
Security and Multi-Tenancy
SaaS vendors can deploy a single, shared instance of Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform using common code and data definitions that can be used by multiple clients. Each client’s reporting and analysis applications, as well as their developers and users, will exist in a secured instance, so any other organization’s assets will be completely separate and inaccessible. Even more important is multi-dimensional security. As each user has his/her own role and domain access, users in the same domain can report on the same databases. So as you add users, domains, and tenants, your BI solution needs to scale to support them all in a completely secure manner that matches your security requirements.
Improving business processes and focusing on core business missions without distraction is paramount to the growth of ISV market share. By adding BI expertise to their existing vertical-market and technology know-how, solution providers are positioned to complement the services they already deliver – and expand their offerings to new customers. Information Builders, the provider of WebFOCUS, a market-leading BI platform, proudly partners with many technology venders to deliver SaaS solutions. Following are just a few examples of such successes:
Varolii
A leader in the market for automated, multi-channel communication technologies, Varolii delivers on-demand solutions that allow organizations to effectively interact with large numbers of customers and employees. The Varolii ID™ platform dynamically analyzes past responses from communication recipients, to personalize future outreach. When customers were dissatisfied with the solution’s complex and inflexible reporting capabilities, Varolii turned to Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI platform. By extending Varolii ID with advanced BI functionality, including the ability to quickly and easily create user self-guided reports, the company is empowering its customers to conduct more intuitive analysis of communication results, using more up-to-date information. More than 380 organizations, including Southwest Airlines, Time Warner Cable, and Southern California Edison, trust Varolii to make about four million communications every day. Now Varolli and its customers respond more rapidly to changing marketplace conditions, optimize core processes, and maximize productivity and cost-efficiency. They leverage WebFOCUS for fully customized reports and dashboards that are available via the web with users simply choosing columns, sort criteria, measures, and output formats from drop-down menus. These same reports and dashboards can be easily distributed based on a schedule, as an occurrence, or as an event, which can be managed by a group administrator or an individual subscriber. The WebFOCUS ReportCaster engine can handle hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users, without the need for individual licenses or specialized desktop software. A single, large report can be burst into sections, with only appropriate pages delivered to authorized users.
CDS Global
A leading provider of outsourced business solutions for e-commerce, payment processing, marketing, order management, and fulfillment, CDS built and deployed a SaaS reporting environment called InFOCUS Circ+. More than 150 of the company’s publisher clients can now achieve a clear view of business metrics by visualizing circulation, fulfillment, and order-management data via the Internet. In addition to standard reports, users can also leverage WebFOCUS Active Technology reports, which combine data and interactive controls in a single, self-contained HTML or PDF file. This allows them to conduct deep analysis and drill-downs, even when they are disconnected from the network. Active Technology reports and dashboards can run anywhere including on all mobile devices. With Active Technologies, companies can deliver device-independent, device-exploitive content by creating a single web application that leverages a browser’s inherent capabilities to dynamically take advantage of its native look
and feel (including gesturing on touch-screen devices). Report consumers can then manipulate the contents into diverse permutations on their own, and forward these reports to other users without any network or device constraints. In addition, Active Technology dashboards and reports delivered as self-contained Adobe Flash files or content embedded in Adobe PDFs become engaging, fully interactive, user-friendly applications.
Chrome River Technologies
Chrome River, which provides online expense reporting and spend-management solutions, found that it can “demonstrate sophisticated reporting capabilities to our prospects, and that’s hugely important. Additionally, the BI software frees up our internal development resources, so we can focus on building core functionality instead of creating reporting tools,” according to Chrome River’s Chief Executive Officer Allan Rich. Chrome River’s users now have in-depth analytical capabilities and can generate their own user-guided reports, including complex reports containing highly sophisticated charts and graphs. As a result, clients have improved visibility into spending patterns, so they can achieve greater control over their expenses.
Every area of business can benefit from enterprise reporting. Quantifiable measurement of an organization’s operations received in a format you use every day – Excel, Word, Acrobat, e-mail, mobile device, or the web – makes information available to more users, faster. It can impact business decisions immediately. By examining information gleaned from your application – from many perspectives such as sales, marketing, executive, customer satisfaction, and vendor supplies – a more complete picture of operations is gained and customers can plan for the future much more accurately. This cements usage of the application and drives revenue.
Jobs2Web
This interactive recruitment marketing firm, which helps companies improve the way they find, engage, and market jobs to prospective candidates, uses WebFOCUS to help its clients measure and monitor the effectiveness of job marketing campaigns and channels. A series of dashboards combine summary-level analysis with detailed drill-down capabilities to provide deep data manipulation and report-scheduling capabilities. Clients are saving money as they enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their job-marketing activities. Jobs2Web has also seen a large revenue boost through sales of this advanced analytics package.
Unisys
Unisys helps air cargo organizations achieve success through the most powerful open cargo system in the world, delivered as a SaaS offering and within a community framework to keep it ahead of regulatory and industry developments. The company reached a recent milestone on one of its cloud servers that has run non-stop for more than 1,500 days and executed over 3 billion
transactions in that time. “From the early days of the Internet, Unisys has been leveraging the power of the web to allow our clients to book, manage, and control air cargo transactions securely and reliably in a cloud-based, software-as-a-service model,” said Christopher Shawdon, vice president, Logistics Solutions, for Unisys.
Set Your Goals and Measure Results
As with any initiative, you need to sit back and scope out the project, expectations, and goals. BI applications are generally linked to a company’s strategic and tactical goals, and it is important to fully understand all the ways in which a proposed initiative may affect your overall solution. New applications of BI technologies actually help companies more accurately measure the results obtained from various business initiatives. For example, applications that support activity-based costing efforts give companies a more accurate view of the cost of the numerous processes behind their operations. This helps them understand more clearly what they save when those processes are made more efficient.
How many different databases and applications are used in your customer’s organization? Do they use DB2, Salesforce.com, or SAP? All of the above? For reporting to be effective, you need to access all of those databases and applications – in real time. These databases are important to your application, and your customers may need the ability to interface each of them through various information systems.
For example, when customers call to place an order, your system needs to be able to identify a platinum customer and automatically route that person’s call to a platinum-level customer service representative. With an intelligent system, customers key in an order number via their telephones, and the system can direct their requests to an order-entry system to determine the status of their orders. It can then send the pertinent information to the marketing database, where records of all customer inquiries are maintained. Data begets data.
Integration technology, such as iWay Software from Information Builders, can integrate SaaS application data with on-premise data to ensure that your application’s reporting reflects real-time information. You can achieve seamless integration between your applications and other internal and external systems – making them an integral part of strategic initiatives such as business-to-business integration, enterprise information management, or business process automation – without the need for costly, time-consuming, high-risk hand coding. You can experience:
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n Real-time monitoring and management – Gain complete visibility into all data integration
and movement processes, so you can track status and instantly detect errors
■
n Rapid development and service creation – Standards-based software ensures there’s
no need for niche skills or middleware expertise. A drag-and-drop interface enables direct connectivity to your application via service-oriented architecture services, XML, etc.
■
n Unlimited integration possibilities – Pre-built adapters connect to any database, messaging
system, or pre-packaged application
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n Flexible deployment options – Support major integration and development platforms,
including integration brokers and J2EE application servers, as well as .NET, service transactions, and event architectures over a wide variety of transport mechanisms
Natively accessing data from your application with your customer’s corporate databases and applications – without sacrificing performance – isn’t a farfetched notion, especially if it drives revenue and brings about impactful organizational change for customers.
A customer-facing BI solution must have the richest possible reporting capabilities and take full advantage of a company’s existing data to provide a complete picture of daily operations and leverage that
information toward future trends and products. Information Builders’ WebFOCUS SaaS solution provides:
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n Complete access to information without the heavy investment of time and money ■
n Covers all information needs – from data inception to information quality and delivery ■
n Embedded analytics capabilities that give users access to information without having to connect
to a server
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n Scalable and extendable capabilities so it grows as your company grows
Unlike piecemeal systems that are typically inadequate to address the complex layers of data scattered throughout an organization, WebFOCUS provides a robust, multi-faceted infrastructure that works seamlessly with multiple levels of security, including website, data, and application security, as well as high-level encryption. This is particularly important in SaaS scenarios, because it ensures that data cannot be intercepted as it is transferred from the web application to the user’s desktop, and it prevents clients from gaining access to other customers’ information and assets. WebFOCUS is simple for users, yet centralized for IT management and control. Because it is a cloud solution, it is inexpensive as there are no up-front hardware and licensing costs. Instead, WebFOCUS features a minimal monthly fee that Information Builders’ channel partners can budget for and use across the spectrum of computers, laptops, smartphones – including Apple and Android – and tablets. WebFOCUS eliminates the need for translation services between IT and end users. Features, such as dashboards, performance management capabilities, enterprise search, and visualization and mapping tools, empower business users to conduct sophisticated analyses without coding or IT expertise. This enables business leaders to make decisions in days, not weeks.
New Features
Information Builders recently rolled out new features to WebFOCUS to ensure a premier SaaS solution that continues to grow as your company grows. These include:
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n Native support for multi-tenancy – Service providers can reduce costs by securely hosting
customers in a shared environment that can quickly scale to accommodate growing demand
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n Powerful security features – Service providers gain unprecedented control over which WebFOCUS
features are available to customers through customizable roles. With this model, providers can differentiate and monetize their reporting service by selectively offering features such as ad hoc reporting, report scheduling, end-user content sharing, and delegated administration
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n Tenant on-boarding templates – An industry first, which automate the process of creating
content folders, groups, roles, and security policies for new customers. WebFOCUS features several SaaS templates to simplify on-boarding, and new ones can easily be developed to meet specific business requirements
■
n New integration features – Allow the user’s role, content access, and data sources to be tied to
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) groups, providing better security controls around tenant information
Your customer’s information needs are diverse. Top management will want to use a web browser or a mobile device to see the company’s performance in one view. They will want to drill down and understand the drivers behind corporate performance and be able to e-mail reports to specific employees, board members, partners, vendors, and customers.
It makes sense to leverage the extensive experience of Information Builders – a market leader with more than 35 years of experience in business analytics, integration, and data integrity. We partner with organizations such as Unisys, CDS Global, Chrome River, Varolli, and Jobs2Web, proving the model of embedding effective business analytics and integration solutions into SaaS applications. Partnering with Information Builders allows the added BI components to have your application’s look and feel, ensuring a consistent user experience. It affords you the opportunity to add components such as predictive and sentiment analytics, performance management, and data integration.
Your application is a crucial part of your customers’ information needs. Incorporating proven BI and integration solutions from Information Builders will drive new revenue, accelerate your time to market, and improve application total cost of ownership.
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