Some Thoughts on BI and the Cloud

SOURCE: LogiXML

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel on Business Intelligence in the Cloud at the SIIA All About the Cloud event in San Francisco. I thought I’d take some time to share a few thoughts about LogiXML’s work in the cloud and where I see the discussion headed with regards to BI in the cloud.   There are a number of key areas where BI projects are impacted by the cloud.

Data Sources in the Cloud
For most BI software providers, much of the challenge is connecting to and integrating with a variety of data sources.   As more and more data is moving into the cloud, it’s important that your BI products and components make this easy.  LogiXML makes it easy to connect with cloud data sources, including non-app specific sources such as Amazon DB, and popular application sources such as Salesforce.com, Twitter, Data feeds, etc.   Since not all data is going to be in the cloud, it should also be easy to integrate data across multiple on-premise and cloud sources, so that it can be optimized for your BI dashboards, analytics, and interactive reporting needs.

Cloud Deployments
As more and more applications are moving to the cloud, it’s important not to forget about BI in this mix of critical apps. Finding powerful BI tools that can easily deployed to both public and private clouds – and that are highly scalable – is increasingly important.  With LogiXML’s lightweight, web-based footprint, it’s easy to support both public and private cloud deployments.  We have a number of customers that are working with services such as Amazon’s cloud, Microsoft Azure, and others.

Cloud Enablement
For software and SaaS providers looking to embed BI as part of their offering, the architecture considerations of third party products are very important. The goal should be to find BI products that are cloud-ready, offer lightweight footprints, and provide broad-based sets of features to help ease the transition to the cloud without having to worry about legacy or heavy client-server architectures.

David Abramson is a director of product management at LogiXML. Read more from David here, here, and here.