Interview: IBM Cognos chief Rob Ashe

TalkBack 1 of 1:

• Thread View
• Flat View

IBM is completely missing the SaaS BI trend

I wasn't surprised by Rob's comment that "BI doesn?t lend itself to SaaS" (though I suspect that the folks from Cognos' Celequest acquisition were caught a bit off guard.) But, I strongly disagree. The notion that 'every company is different' has been the rallying cry of every traditional software vendor trying to brush aside the SaaS trend.

Yes, every company is different. When I was at salesforce.com in 1999, the traditional CRM vendors were claiming that CRM doesn't lend itself to SaaS, because every company has a unique sales process, everyone has a different sales organization structure, and everyone manages their pipeline differently. To some extent, that's true. But, there is enough similarity between enough companies that SaaS CRM works as long as the SaaS vendor provides the ability to configure the solution to account for the differences. So, you can configure the sales stages to match those of your company, etc.

The exact same argument holds true for BI. I ran a BI consulting company for many years. Let's use sales analysis as an example. When people want to analyze their sales process, they all want to analyze their numbers a little differently. But, there is enough similarity between the types of questions people ask about their sales process to make SaaS BI work, as long as the vendor gives you the ability to configure the solution to account for the specifics of how your company works. Check out salesforce.com's AppExchange to see the customer success that my company (LucidEra) and others are having with on-demand analytics. How does Rob explain that?

Posted by: Ken Rudin   Posted on: 05/09/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Reducing Server Total Cost of Ownership with VMware Virtualization Software VMware VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and ... Download Now
• VMware Infrastructure: A Guide to Bottom-Line Benefits VMware Frustrated by the costs of maintain ever larger data centers?or building ... Download Now
• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now