Cognos, BusinessObjects scramble for SaaS BI. Really?
By Vivek | January 18th, 2007 at 08:07 pm ET
Recently there has been lot of stir in the Enterprise software market related to SaaS, which has forced enterprise vendors make acquisitions of smaller SaaS players, or so as they call themselves. Last month Business Objects acquired NSite and yesterday Cognos went ahead and bought privately held Celequest. Lets look at both the acquisitions closely.
Celequest is basically a real-time information monitoring solution that provides real-time operational dashboards. Celequest gains traction more on the Fortune 500 companies side who might want to get up-to date analytics of their business. Coming to the real point, Cognos news release claims:
Celequest is the industry’s only dashboarding solution to be offered as an appliance or via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model
I am not sure since when putting a software on an appliance qualified it to be a SaaS service. Appliance located either on the client location or on Cognos data center doesn’t mean that the application itself becomes an On-Demand offering.
Coming to BusinessObjects acquisition of NSite- NSite basically is a transaction oriented platform or as they say an On demand, self service Quote, Proposal and Channel Management solutions. Following is an excerpt from the BO press release:
………the world’s leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced it has acquired NSite Software, Inc., a Sunnyvale, California-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. The acquisition gives Business Objects access to NSite’s on-demand application platform; engineering talent experienced in building and managing SaaS offerings; and approximately 27,000 current NSite subscribers.
Agreed that NSite does offer SaaS kind of service, but I am not sure how BusinessObjects core BI/Reporting products align with NSite platform which in other words enables SMBs to build forms-based applications. BO getting access to NSite’s 27,000 customers is great idea, but what will BO do with them. Try selling them client-server based CrystalReports?
On-Demand and SaaS means an easy to use product(mostly web-based), very clear product matrix, a well defined pricing strategy that offers considerable savings compared to existing products, and a fully hosted solution where client doesn’t even have to think about storage, maintenance, and upgrades. Looking at companies like Cognos, BO, Informatica, Hyperion,… they are far off from the On-Demand path. Even if they do come up with some kind of SaaS capabilities, it is going to be really-really tough for these enterprise vendors to kill their existing revenue streams based on long-term licensing whose price was never justified in first place. Days of pulling off million dollar half-baked product sales deal are going to be over pretty soon. On web where prices are very flexible and it costs a fraction to try out new products, customers will stay only if the product delivers real ROI. Also confusing customers by branding non-SaaS solutions as SaaS is never going to work in the long run.
