Baxter: Business Intelligence channel in danger of missing managed cloud services opportunity

Gartner has predicted that the global Business Intelligence (BI) market will grow by a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 8.7% through 2018. Much of this growth and future interest will be driven by organizations’ willingness to explore BI as cloud-based managed service, with 42% of end-users interested in cloud deployments according to Gartner’s 2015 BI Magic Quadrant research.

This no doubt presents an enormous opportunity for organizations working in the BI channel to partner with vendors to develop fully-managed hosted offerings.

However, Yellowfin’s Managing Director for EMEA, Peter Baxter, said that while a shrewd business model and reliable services revenue beckons, resellers in the BI channel have been slow to deliver on this new demand and are subsequently missing a sizeable opportunity.

“There aren’t a large number of resellers forging vendor agreements, hosting the software on their own managed servers, and offering solutions to customers,” said Baxter in his microscope.co.uk opinion piece, The BI managed service opportunity. “One reason for that could be that many vendors in the BI industry are more focused on building their own proprietary clouds – a bit like Salesforce did with CRM, where the software resides in the vendor’s own data centre. This presents something of a problem for the channel as it reduces the level of ongoing services revenue resellers are able to generate around BI, therefore hitting margins.

“At Yellowfin we actually take the opposite approach. We encourage our reseller partners to meet growing user demand for cloud-based BI by delivering their own managed services. Frankly, we don’t want to host solutions for enterprises, and would much rather our channel partners took on that role. There are some very simple reasons why:”

To read the full article, and to find out what those reasons are, GO HERE >

All smiles: Managing Director for EMEA at Yellowfin, Peter Baxter