Considerations Regarding Business Intelligence in Cloud Context

This paper explores one of the newer challenges related to the field of Business Intelligence: cloud-based business intelligence. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how business intelligence and cloud computing could be used together to provide agility in business. Also, the paper presents briefly the different deployment models for cloud-based BI such as: BI software as a service (BI SaaS) and business analytic platform as a service (BA PaaS). The paper gives an overview of the current state of cloud-based business intelligence market and presents a comparative analysis between the cloud-based BI leaders, using the different criteria. Finally, the paper identifies the strengths and weaknesses of cloud-based BI.


Introduction
Considering the current situation, the businesses must adapt quickly to changes that appear continuously, in a global and dynamic economy, they must be agile.In a world that changes permanently, the leadership position is temporary, only agility creates a competitive advantage for companies.Also, there is too much information that changes faster than the information systems.Information is a strategic resource for companies, and decisions must be taken based on a huge amount of realtime information, from a high variety of internal and external sources, unstructured and structured sources.In the article "The ten dimensions of business agility" [7], Craig le Clair, from Forrester Research, has identified the main factors that influence business agility.They are grouped into three categories: marketing (market responsiveness and channel integration), organization (knowledge dissemination, digital psychology and change management) and IT technologies (business intelligence, infrastructure elasticity, business processes architecture, software innovation and sourcing and supply chain).We can see that cloud computing (that offers a scalable and elastic infrastructure) and business intelligence are two important factors that can influence the agility of a business.Also, during 2010-2015, according to Gartner Group consulting company [3], BI and cloud computing were considered high priority technologies for CIO.In 2014, the market survey included 2339 CIOs from 77 countries, with a total of 300 billion dollars revenue.We can observe that BI has been ranked first from 2012 until today, 50% of those interviewed have considered that BI technology is very important for companies activity Figure 1.Cloud computing ranked first in 2011 and since 2012, it has been constantly ranked third until today.Also, the top two IT technologies which will be subjected to massive investment in 2015 are: business analytics and cloud computing.Cloud computing and business intelligence are part of the core technological platform for digital businesses, named by Gartner Group "the nexus of forces".This technological platform will change the way we see the society and businesses, and also, will create new business models.Also, this platform will modify the way businesses interact with customers, it will change the collaboration with employees and partners and it will improve business agility.The information will be accessible, shareable and usable by anyone, anytime and anywhere.The main characteristics of cloud computing are: "uses the internet technologies, offers a scalable and elastic infrastructure, offers shared resources, fault tolerance, offers services with metered use that are accessible through a standardized interface (for example, web client) over the Internet" [2].The services are offered at the customer's demand and they are flexible, and the resources are dynamically supplied and they can be shared by a large group of clients.Therefore, cloud computing has the potential to help BI systems to become more agile, more flexible and more responsive to changing business requirements.Also, cloud computing is a platform for business applications, for social media, for sharing and hosting data.The following paragraph presents the concept of cloud-based BI and the deployment models for cloud-based BI.Also, the paragraph presents a comparative analysis between the cloud-based BI leaders, using the different criteria.

Cloud-based BI
According to Gartner's definition, cloudbased BI refers to "any analytics effort in which one or more of these elements is implemented in the cloud be it public or privately owned.…The six elements are data sources, data models, processing applications, computing power, analytic models, and sharing or storing of results"[http:// searchbusinessana-lytics.techtarget.com/news/2240019778/Gartner-Thesix-elements-of-cloud-analytics-and-SaaS-BI].According to [1] cloud-based BI refers to "the BI technologies and solutions that employ one or more cloud deployment models".Cloud-based BI is a relatively new concept, which refers to the components of a BI system delivered as services, but also to the data used by the BI system, data which can be stored in cloud.The components of a traditional BI system (ETL instruments, data warehouse, BI tools and business analytics solutions, business performance management tools and BPM applications) can be delivered as cloud services.As shown in Figure 2, any combination is possible, depending on the company requirements and objectives.For example, data sources can be loaded on the client servers to ensure their security, and the applications and instruments for business analysis can be stored in the cloud.However, data security can be compromised because data must be accessed and analyzed over the Internet.This is a hybrid deployment model for cloud-based BI.Other deployment models for cloud-based BI are: public (all data in the cloud) and private.Cloud-based BI solutions are much more flexible than traditional BI solutions.Therefore, a cloud-based BI solution may be a feasible answer to the challenges of a dynamic global economy.DOI: 10.12948/issn14531305/19.4.2015.05 Cloud-based BI refers to: BI SaaS (BI software as a service), BI for PaaS (platform as a service), BI for SaaS and BA PaaS (business analytic platform as a service).BI SaaS is also known as on-demand BI and includes:  BI SaaS tools that can be used to develop BI applications for deployment in a cloud;  packaged BI SaaS applications that can be deployed in a cloud environment (for example, applications for business analysis or business performance management applications);  data integration services for BI;  developing/ testing services for BI.According to Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and analytics platforms -2015 [13], the BI market leaders are: Tableau, Qlik, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, SAS, Oracle, Microstrategy and Information Builders.However, the main leaders for cloud-based BI solutions are those from challengers' quadrant and the niche players' quadrant: Birst (a pioneer in cloud-based BI), and GoodData.Figure 4 presents the cloud deployment scores for each vendor, according to [14].Each vendor has been evaluated on the following cloud deployment capabilities: "self-service elasticity, self-service administration, data warehouse and data integration capabilities, connectors to cloud-based data sources, direct connect for cloud and on-premises data sources (hybrid) and packaged content" [14].We observe that Birst have the highest score -3.7.GoodData is not included in survey.Also, according to [1] the top cloud BI vendors are Birst (1 st ), GoodData (2 nd ), Adaptive Insights (3 rd ), Information Builders (3 rd ) and Microstrategy (4 th ).

BI for PaaS
Yellowfin +Elastic Intelligence+Con nection Cloud -PaaS etc.  [12], [16] SAS Cloud Analytics -a BI SaaS -supports: reporting, dashboard, decision trees, network diagrams, onthe-fly forecasting, goal seeking, scenario analysis, path analysis , text sentiment analysis; SAS Cloud -a private cloud PaaS -includes: SAS virtual applications (vApps), SAS Visual Analytics with Visual Statistics -an integrated platform for data exploration, dashboarding, ad-hoc reporting and analysis on public cloud (on AWS)/private cloud / SAS cloud environment, SAS central -a role -based Web portal for managing SAS cloud accounts, applications, users and environments and for uploading data, SAS App Engine for delivery and maintenance of SAS vApps through SAS App Central; Qlik [11]  The importance of cloud-based BI solutions has significantly increased every year from 2012 until today.The major factor for the cloud-based business intelligence market growth is the huge volume of structured and unstructured data.

BA PaaS
Table 3.The strengths and the weaknesses of cloud-based BI Strengths Weaknesses -the companies can implement a BI service/ a SaaS BI solution faster and easier than an onpremise BI solution.Also, the costs for implementation and maintenance of software/hardware and training costs are reduced; -lower level of effort and lower risks; -by reducing costs, small companies can use the same IT technologies as big ones.The used service is paid, which is financially more effective than investing in hardware and software acquisitions; -it offers immediate access to hardware resources, without any additional investments, it reduces the time to develop BI solutions; -it increases the speed of deployment of BI solutions; -data security, protection against authenticity fraud and cyber-attacks and security standards; Security is the most important aspect of a cloud-based BI solution; -the costs and time needed for big data transfers in cloud.In a public cloud there can be replicated only some of the stored data in the client data warehouse, or the entire data warehouse can be uploaded into cloud (solution used if transactional applications are in the cloud, meaning all resources are uploaded in the cloud); -integrating data from cloud and on-premise sources; -the lack of a strategy for how to combine and integrate cloud services with on-premises capabilities; DOI: 10.12948/issn14531305/19.4.2015.05-easy sharing of information (only Web browser); -self-service BI, it requires reduced IT skills; -the SaaS solutions provider is forced to offer the latest software versions and to configure it.In this way, the SaaS BI version can be updated continuously, so there is much more flexibility.
-auditing (risk assessment, prevention, detection, response to attack) is hard to be accomplished because data are on the outside of organization; -legal issues (who is responsible for regulatory compliance, if the cloud provider subcontracts the services of another cloud provider).
Usually, small companies are those who want the implementation of a cloud-based BI solution.Also, small companies prefer public cloud BI solutions.According to [1] and [9], the most interested business departments in cloud-based BI are: sales (with most public BI cloud implementations) and marketing.Also, the most interested industry segments in cloud-based BI are telecommunications industry and retail &wholesale [1].The main types of cloud-based BI projects are Sales Analytics, Risk Management and Marketing Analytics [9].Also, the Gartner Magic Quadrant [12] shows that the primary interest is in hybrid and private cloud-based BI.For example, financial services and marketing prefer private cloud, but retail prefers public cloud [1].The main factors that determine the implementation of a cloud-based BI solution by companies and the main problems which appear during the implementation of a cloudbased BI solution are presented in Table 3.

Conclusions
The article presented the current state of the cloud-based BI market, and a comparative analysis between the cloud-based BI leaders.Also, the article briefly presented the different deployment models for BI on cloud.The combination of cloud computing and business intelligence can provide a more flexible BI solution that aligns with business objectives.Cloud computing has the potential to help BI to become BI for everyone.Also, cloud and business intelligence provide decision makers the ability to quickly make predictions and decisions that influence performance in business.Cloud-based BI can change the role of decision makers from information consumer to information producer.

Table 1
presents the cloud-based BI market leaders and their solutions: Birst, GoodData, SAP, Microstrategy, Tableau, SAS, Oracle, IBM, Tibco, Qlik, Information Builders, Microsoft and Bime.There are presented the main features for each cloud-based BI solution.

Table 1 .
The cloud-based BI market leaders IBM Cloud Managed Services (a fully managed IaaS) or IBM SoftLayer self-service IaaS; IBM Bluemix PaaS -based on Cloud Foundry and Openstack open technologies and runs on SoftLayer infrastructure, with over 100 services; over 100 IBM SmartCloud Solutions (SaaS and BPaaS) such as: IBM SPSS Decision Management software as a service, IBM Cognos Sales Performance Management on cloud, IBM smarter cities solutions on cloud, IBM commerce on cloud, Oracle Database cloud service, Oracle Java Cloud service, Oracle Database backup service, Oracle BI cloud service (BICS), Oracle messaging cloud service, Oracle documents cloud service, Oracle Database cloud-Exadata service, Oracle Archive Storage Cloud Service, Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Big Data SQL Cloud Service, Oracle Integration Cloud Service, Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, Oracle Process cloud service, Oracle Node.jsCloud; Oracle IaaS includes Oracle IaaS Public Cloud Services, Oracle storage cloud service and Oracle Compute Cloud service; SAS Development/testing services (IBM Rational soft delivery services, Oracle Java public cloud services, etc.) IaaS for BI (Microsoft Azure, Oracle IaaS, IBM cloud managed services, SAP Hana, etc.) Web client, mobile applications DOI: 10.12948/issn14531305/19.4.2015.05-a self-service cloud-based data discovery tool; -focus on search-oriented visual analysis, predictive analytics, statistical analysis, self-service analytics, data visualization; -uses a natural-language query; DOI: 10.12948/issn14531305/19.4.2015.05 -