A Conceptual Framework for Business Intelligence as a Service (SaaS BI)

With the rapid development of web technology, an increasing number of enterprises having been seeking for a method to facilitate business decision making process, power the bottom line, and achieve a fully coordinated organization, called business intelligence (BI). Unfortunately, traditional BI tends to be unmanageable, risky and prohibitively expensive, especially for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The emergence of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) provides a cost effective solution. Recently, business intelligence applications delivered via SaaS, termed as Business Intelligence as a Service (SaaS BI), has proved to be the next generation in BI market. However, since SaaS BI just comes in its infant stage, a general framework maybe poorly considered. Therefore, in this paper we proposed a general conceptual framework for SaaS BI, and presented several possible future directions of SaaS BI.