Mid-market solutions tend to sell themselves on factors such as ease of use, quick implementation times, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), diversity in deployment methods and licensing, broader payment structures and lower price points. These are the reasons proliferated in the market regarding why and how small and mid-sized companies can take advantage of business intelligence without paying high prices and without having strong internal IT infrastructure.

But with organizations struggling to integrate business intelligence (BI) into their environments within an economy that won’t tolerate mistakes, the ability to apply mid-market strategy and solutions that currently exist within the marketplace to enterprise organizations is becoming a valuable choice for larger organizations looking to take advantage of what business intelligence has to offer. Organizations that may have been open to high investments and longer implementation times in order to develop a full scale in-house BI and data warehousing application/toolset are no longer willing to invest the time, money and resources required. Organizations now want immediate gratification from their investments. Whether in the guise of deployments within hours or days as opposed to weeks or months, or in the form of measurable performance improvements quickly, there is a push away from traditional business intelligence due to a perceived lack of flexibility.

Coupling economic downturn and the advent of lower cost and low maintenance solutions actually presents a new opportunity on two fronts. First, solution providers offering business intelligence as a service and/or with low cost subscription fees can take advantage of this market because they already have the structure in place to implement solutions quickly. They can offer services to customers freeing organizations from the requirement of on-premise expertise, and they can offer ongoing support at a fraction of the cost of large-scale implementations. They do this while providing the same basic features and functionality of their traditional BI counterparts. Second, and maybe more importantly, because of this new advantage for niche players in the market, organizations now have the upper hand. They can pick and choose exactly what they want to implement or have hosted, giving them more freedom without additional hassles.

This article looks at how targeted mid-market solutions are now shifting toward the enterprise and how enterprise organizations are starting to apply these solutions within their organizations to maximize performance.

Toward the Enterprise

Some BI solutions that were formerly targeted at mid-sized companies are now moving back toward the enterprise. A year ago, talk was being directed at how small and mid-sized companies were better poised to take advantage of BI solutions now that alternative options existed. Ironically, with the economic downturn, these same solutions are being rolled out by enterprise organizations looking to take advantage of the same aspects targeted to mid-market companies, but on a larger scale. Swayne Hill, President and CEO of Cloud9 Analytics, a BI solution based in the cloud, stated in a recent interview with WiseAnalytics that within cloud analytics and the on-demand sector, he is seeing the shift in adoption moving from small and mid-sized companies toward the enterprise. Companies are now looking for targeted solutions that can meet their business requirements and that allow them flexibility in design and execution, which companies such as Cloud9 Analytics and other on-demand suites are able to do more efficiently because of their constant interaction with customers.

Aside from faster implementation times and the ability to update and change the information required at a quicker rate than when dealing with internal IT departments, the last few years have pushed the emphasis away from IT managed solutions and toward departmental or operational type deployments. The implication of this is that in some cases departments and/or business units prefer having hosted solutions where the vendor plays a consulting role and the turnaround time is almost immediate, allowing end users to react to market changes more rapidly. By placing the ability to design and maintain solutions in the hands of end users, the ability to hone in to solve business pains, to manage trends and to develop forecasts can be achieved more easily. And although not just limited to on-demand, these solutions seem to provide some of the best recent examples of the shift from mid-market toward the enterprise.

Using Tableau Software as another example, Elissa Fink, the VP of Marketing expanded upon her company’s announcement of 16 quarters of growth in a row by citing quick implementation times and lower costs as reasons why companies are continuing to invest in business intelligence. In an economic downturn, companies do not have the option to take time to make decisions or to wait many months to implement a solution. They require quick value assessments and the ability to get a solution up and running almost immediately.

These insights highlight the fact that what organizations are looking for is starting to shift. Because large organizations generally have larger data volumes than their smaller counterparts, and because there are more constraints around that data, silos are more likely to exist, which helps feed into the concept of departmental rather than overall solutions. Although this goes against the push towards BI for the masses and developing an enterprise-wide BI strategy, this becomes a key advantage for vendors that put power of use into the hands of the end users.

Focusing on the Department

Within many enterprise companies, it becomes more feasible to deploy business intelligence across multiple departments to analyze a wide variety of business issues while giving end users the autonomy to create their own applications. Consequently, many mid-market solutions are poised to do just that. Many mid-market solutions are developed to give end users the ability to customize and change how they view and analyze data as well as the information they are accessing without IT or third-party consultation. Because these solutions are built on the premise that smaller businesses do not have access to extensive IT departments, solutions are generally more intuitive related to end user access, customization, and the ability to develop new or different applications easily.

What this means for enterprise organizations looking for business intelligence is that departments can act independently to develop applications that suit their requirements, manage their data sets, and still share accurate and relevant data across the organization. What mid-market solutions have, whether on-demand or on-premise, is a greater likelihood that solutions were developed with the business user in mind. And although this is not always the case, the reality remains that solutions targeted to small and mid-sized organizations target business users over their IT counterparts in relation to solution management.

With the debate over the value of deploying departmental solutions at the cost of information sharing across the organization, the ability to use these solutions independently of IT does have some downsides. If organizations do not have a way to manage and share information across the organization or do not value the ability to collaborate across multiple business units, then putting these solutions in the hands of departments increases the likelihood of additional silos being created.

Conclusion

Overall, as the economy continues to play havoc with organizations, the reality of mid-market solutions expanding back toward the enterprise is an obvious extension of a combination of conservative spending and the intrinsic value of managing performance more closely. With a wider range of solution offerings targeting the mid-market and the ability to implement business intelligence more quickly in many cases, it becomes obvious that enterprise organizations looking to maintain their business while expanding their view of their organization and how it fits within their respective markets will continue to turn to mid-market solutions in hopes of achieving these goals while saving costs.

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