As organizational leaders, managers, and knowledge workers face mounting pressure to accomplish more and more work in a shorter amount of time, there’s increasing demand for agile analytics tools and techniques that can enable business professionals to make fully informed decisions quickly.
Meanwhile, business users now expect the ability to access and analyze data under their terms—when and where they choose to—without the need to wait on IT to deliver customized reports or to deploy analytics tools to departments once there’s availability in the IT project pipeline.
Indeed, as organizational workloads become more sophisticated and legacy systems, and enterprise architectures are pushed to their boundaries, businesses are requiring greater agility, increased flexibility, faster time-to-value, and real economic impact.
These are just some of the reasons that 26% of senior executives say their organizations plan to migrate to cloud-based analytics platforms, according to a study conducted by Avere Systems.
One of the most attractive selling points for cloud analytics is the use of a more flexible OpEx (operating expenditures) pricing model. Under an OpEx pricing model for cloud analytics, there’s no long-term commitment to the tools and assets being invested in. Companies typically pay for cloud analytics services on a monthly or quarterly basis, offering greater flexibility.
In addition, companies that rely on cloud analytics automatically receive software updates and new features immediately without having to endure costly and time-consuming efforts to install updates themselves.
Moreover, the up-front cost avoidance offered through the OpEx model enables organizations to free up cash flow.
By comparison, under a CapEx (capital expenditures) model for premise-based analytics, companies not only have to pay annual software licensing and maintenance fees for analytics tools, but also for associated servers, peripheral devices, and IT staff to support these technologies.
Shifting to an OpEx model under the use of cloud-based analytics also enables organizational leaders to improve time-to-value through the use of analytics by avoiding the lengthy process for obtaining budgetary approvals for capital investments. Instead of waiting weeks or months to have funding approved and to install premise-based analytics software, companies that use cloud-based analytics tools can become operational within days or even hours.
Next Steps:
- Try Spotfire and start discovering meaningful insights in your own data.
- Read the “10 Best Practices for Cloud Business Intelligence: Enabling the Business” report conducted by Enterprise Management Associates for additional insights on these and other benefits of cloud analytics.
