It still remains to be seen whether or not organizations will choose to invest in business intelligence during a recession. Due to financial and market uncertainties, there are generally two ways organizations might look at business intelligence (BI) and its overall value to the organization. First, that cutting budgets and limiting IT spending will save costs. Or second, that it becomes even more important to manage an organization’s performance and that this will, in turn, lower overall expenses and help organizations stay competitive. Whichever way organizations on a large scale choose to look at things remains to be seen as both sentiments have potential value.

Cutting costs may remain at the forefront of an organization’s goals for 2009, but do these goals offset the ability to improve performance? How do organizations stay competitive and use business intelligence without breaking the bank? Luckily, many solutions exist that can help organizations set targets, manage their performance and proactively meet business goals without high financial investment. Solutions that have always been available but less well known or overlooked can now find their place in many organizations without the investment required for traditional BI implementations.

Recent market diversity and a push to offer mid-market business intelligence to organizations with less IT involvement and lower price points have actually created potential competitive advantage for these companies because of the economic downturn. From an end-user standpoint, more options now exist for organizations with less budget to spend but that want to take advantage of business intelligence. Whatever the organization’s size, mid-market solutions have increased the ability to deploy business intelligence in a way that meets an organization’s budget constraints. Add to this diverse deployment methods and product and/or services costs, and business intelligence becomes more palatable when resources are limited.

This article looks at ways to deploy business intelligence and analytics that do not break the bank, providing some alternatives to traditional deployments for organizations contemplating whether they should invest in business intelligence.

Free Business Intelligence

Market diversity enables organizations to pick and choose what solution best meets their immediate and future needs. Because requirements evolve over time, organizations desire additional flexibility. Add to this tight budget constraints, and this kind of BI market flexibility and low or no-price options might be the way for organizations to implement business intelligence while cutting costs. Two such options for organizations are Google Docs and open source.

With the ability to use analytics free of charge, organizations that choose not to invest in business intelligence or that do not want to increase their expenses can take advantage of Panorama’s partnership with Google Docs and use analytics embedded within their Google Apps applications free of charge. With Google Analytics being used to monitor website traffic and to perform analytics, the ability to embed BI into Google Apps expands the use of Google in general. The user interface mimics the look and feel of Excel through Google spreadsheets and allows end users to take advantage of data mashups and business intelligence together through iGoogle. With the ability to access data and take advantage of Web 2.0 interaction at the same time, organizations can combine Web 2.0 and collaboration with their BI usage in a way that matches the way they use the Internet outside of business. This ability represents the goal of solution providers in terms of being able to provide intuitive and user-friendly business intelligence. In addition to being easy to use, Panorama’s added features give users a nice amount of BI functionality that is comparable to other mainstream solutions. Overall, the real selling point for organizations is that it is also free of charge.

Open source is another alternative to large-scale BI projects. In addition to front-end BI solutions offered by vendors such as Actuate, Pentaho and Jaspersoft, organizations looking for data integration or data warehousing have options as well. Two such examples are Talend for data integration and MySQL for data warehousing. Even though open source generally requires developer support and internal development, the costs of implementation and support can be free of charge if not considering employee time allocation. Although enterprise versions of software exist (as well as additional support options) because of the strong emphasis on community and sharing code, it becomes possible for organizations with strong internal resources to maintain and expand solutions on their own. This means that open source becomes a viable option for organizations with strong internal IT infrastructures that want to implement or enhance their current BI environment but that don’t want to increase their budget allocation for such projects.

Try Before You Buy

An increase in competition and the number of overall solutions available creates a market in which end user organizations have the advantage. Because there is so much to choose from, many solution providers now offer free trials so that organizations can download and try the software free for a set time period, usually 30 days. Vendors hope that once organizations see the benefits of the application, they will select their solution. In addition, because of the initial setup, vendors anticipate that since there has been an investment to get the solution up and running (for example, connecting the data and customizing the user interface) that the organization will become a customer after the free trial. These are valid assumptions so it becomes important for organizations to research the solutions and make sure there is a fit beforehand.

Free trials exist in most areas within business intelligence. Organizations can find solutions that can be easily downloaded, and in some cases they include examples of business units or solutions to help end users get started. Some examples of general offerings include SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence OnDemand, LogiXML and Birst. In addition, more targeted trials exist such as with Corda and their data visualization offerings geared toward performance management.

General Lower Cost Alternatives

For organizations considering BI projects, lower cost alternatives exist. Instead of being tied into selecting an overall solution, organizations now have the choice to implement a dashboard to get started or access their data warehouse as a service and have it supported off premise. Basically, organizations can pick and choose what aspects of business intelligence they want to implement and how. And because of the increase in diversity, solution providers are developing ways to offer their products and services at lower price points, whether this means offering software as a service (SaaS) or utilizing open source solutions to be able to provide less expensive solutions.

BI diversity enables organizations to take advantage of the type of solution that best suits their requirements. For instance, mid-market organizations are assumed to have less IT infrastructure and smaller budgets available. Because of this, subscription-based solutions and on-demand models have become popular because organizations get all the advantages of a large-scale solution without the initial setup or support requirements. In many cases, business units that want autonomy and ownership over their use of business intelligence choose an on-demand model as well. Either way, deploying business intelligence as a service lets organizations take advantage of Web-based access to analytics without the hassle of developing and implementing the solution at their end. In addition, depending on what solution is chosen, organizations can pay as little as $10 per user per month.

Data warehousing vendors such as Greenplum and Infobright build their platforms off of open source database solutions. In addition, Information Builders uses R, an open source statistical tool, to increase their predictive analytics capabilities. The use of open source as a base enables these vendors to offer more robust solutions at lower prices as opposed to developing specific features and functionality in house. In these cases, solutions might be less expensive than their direct competitors because the development costs are less than their competitors.

The Possibility of Business Intelligence

In conclusion, business intelligence solutions do exist that take into account budget constraints. With low-cost or no-cost solutions available, business intelligence is still a valid option during difficult economic times. The general benefits of business intelligence notwithstanding, organizations can now take advantage of BI, share information across the organizations and collaborate, while taking into account lower budget allocations and less internal resources.

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