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I recently read an interesting interview about mobile business intelligence, BI trends and cloud computing with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy. The interview was made by Jason Stamper from Computer Business Review, who is now widely regarded throughout Europe as „The Economist” of the IT industry.

MicroStrategy Cloud (MSC) is the first cloud service purpose-built for the world's largest data volumes, high concurrency and high performance. MicroStrategy Cloud scales dynamically in response to demand, from tens of users to tens of thousands. MSC is also configured, optimized and maintained by MicroStrategy, so organizations no longer have to worry about provisioning hardware, tuning the architecture, or upgrading software.

MicroStrategy Cloud customers can connect directly to their on-premises or cloud-based data sources via MicroStrategy’s multisource capabilities. In addition, customers can opt to build and host their own database on the MicroStrategy Cloud through integrated database and ETL (extract, transform, and load) options.

Compared to traditional on-premises BI approaches, MicroStrategy Cloud is quicker to deploy and more flexible, delivers world-class performance, and offers significant financial advantages. MicroStrategy Cloud eliminates inefficient and risky processes related to planning, architecting, sourcing, contracting, budgeting, hiring, training, installing, testing, deploying, and more. And it is designed to deliver the highest available levels of security and operational control.

I recently read an article published by Brett Beaubouef on his blog (Cloud ERP – New Dog, Same Fleas), about the future of ERP in the cloud. Referring to the traditional ERP, Brett called these systems „the panacea for all business automation pains”. Instead, Cloud ERP is positioned as a revolutionary approach to deploying an ERP solution.
„Practically speaking, Cloud ERP is just another deployment option available to customers. Cloud ERP provides a solution that is flexible, adaptable, scalable, efficient, and affordable. Customers can enjoy painless upgrades, rapid deployment, and easy customization along with availability “anywhere at anytime”!”, said Beaubouef.
The question that arises is the following: are there major differences between those two ERP solutions? At first sight, it seems not. The activities required for an “on premise” ERP implementation are also required for Cloud ERP and the scope and responsibility for the implementation activities are still required. And then, what would be „the key impacts that a Cloud ERP deployment will have on the implementation?”
As Brett said in his article, „from a technology perspective, Cloud ERP offers a faster implementation timeframe and provides very robust functionality”, but if the organization is not prepared to properly use the software then the value of Cloud ERP will quickly dissipate. Also, „integration will be a greater challenge in a Cloud ERP model versus an on-premise ERP model – if only because the Cloud ERP will be outside the company’s internal network”.
Than, the customizations and integrations are impacted based upon the cloud model. Regarding Brett, a customer will have greater flexibility if the customer has a dedicated instance. „If multiple customers are on single software then the Cloud ERP provider may limit the level of integrations and customizations because the software changes may have an adverse impact on all the customers on a shared instance”, specified Brett.
As a conclusion, As with every deployment model, there are advantages and disadvantages to consider. „But it is important to remember that Cloud ERP is not a short cut to success”, noted Beaubouef.

BITSoftware participates on April 21, in Bucharest, at „Cloud Computing, SaaS, IaaS", a tehnology conference dedicated to cloud computing and that promotes some of the most reliable solutions available on Romanian market. The event will be held at Intercontinental Hotel.

Few years ago, only large companies needed ERP software. Now, it can benefit form this technology even the small and mid-size businesses. In a recent article published on erpsoftwareblog, Jeff Pyden stated that the cloud computing technology is faster adopted by businesses with no more than 50 employees. In his opinion, „the emergence of the cloud is yet another step toward making this powerful technology available to those who otherwise may not be able to afford it.”

He indicated five reasons why small and mid-size businesses prefer a cloud ERP solution rather than a traditional one: limited budgets, faster deployment, security and data management, businesses continuity, growth and scale.

The first indicated reason - limited budgets - refers to the total costs of implementing and maintaining an on-premise ERP solution, which „is often not feasible for small businesses”. „It’s difficult for many small and mid-sized businesses to afford the up-front costs of an on-premise ERP solution”, Jeff said. But what is the option? An open source ERP, of course. For example, the total cost of implementation and use of our open source solution, SocrateOpen, is less than the on-premise version.

The faster deployment refers to the fact that „a cloud-hosted ERP solution can be deployed quickly, allowing businesses to start reaping the benefits of the solution sooner”. By streamlining and connecting internal processes, such as finance, sales, marketing, invoicing and others, „organizations can work more efficiently and gain a competitive edge from the beginning”.

In terms of business continuity, with an ERP system in the cloud, „it’s easier to get back up and running after unforeseen interruptions”, said Pyden. In other words, it’s important to consider a solution that is accessible via the cloud, because you will be able to recover data more quickly than from a physical database.

Finally, the „growth and scale” reason refers to changes that occur in a business lifetime, which can becomes larger or fluctuate in size, and in this case the „cloud-based applications can easily scale to accommodate growth”. This means that users can quickly be added or removed as needed.

The conclusion is that the ERP in the cloud is good for small and mid-size organizations, cause „cloud-based applications can provide fundamental business services to young companies at a fraction of the cost”.

David Linthicum said recently, in his article published on InfoWorld.com, that „those who follow the world of business intelligence (BI) have probably noticed both an increase in new cloud BI providers and the movement of existing providers to the cloud”. BI in the clouds means that the information is copied to a cloud data warehouse and then is structured, typically around the important parts of a business: sales, inventory, manufactoring, payments. „Once the data is in the cloud, you can run reports, create dashboards, and perform analytical operations that support core business decisions from a Web app”, said Linthicum. He belives that the use of Business Intelligence in the cloud is „a game-changer”, being „affordable and available” to those who need access to this information.

But what is the benefit? Why should I choose a cloud BI solution instead of a traditional BI solution?

According to Linthicum and other specialists in cloud computing, the traditional data warehousing and BI „have always been too expensive” and moreover, the users who needed these BI systems to make critical business decisions „typically had no access, with IT citing cost and complexity of deploying and managing the front-end BI tools”. Instead, with a cloud-based BI, the cost drops dramatically and managers „can use the information to improve business operations when it counts”. Plus, cloud-based BI provides better support for smartphones and tablets and makes it available to those who actually need them.

So, there are enough benefits for you?

As is announced on their blog, the MicroStrategy BI software platform will be available as a service in the cloud. With MicroStrategy Cloud Intelligence, MicroStrategy will host and maintain the entire BI environment, including servers, operating system, MicroStrategy 9 software and network. As they said on official MicroStrategy website, „MicroStrategy Cloud Intelligence is expected to offer elastic capacity to meet the availability and performance requirements necessary for critical BI reporting and analysis, supporting both small usage patterns for departmental BI applications, as well as the high-scale usage patterns for extranet applications”. With MicroStrategy Cloud Intelligence, which is currently in beta testing, subscribers will have full access to MicroStrategy Technical Support for assistance. Cloud Intelligence can be a means of providing the best configuration, support, and maintenance straight from MicroStrategy by offering it through the cloud. If you need more informations about it, take a look to http://blog.microstrategy.com/2011/02/wrap-up-of-microstrategy-world-2011/#more-657

I read recently, on LinkedIn, a debate about how firm size does or doesnt matter when you want to switch to using Collaborative Cloud. And the conclusion of the debate was that company size does not matter when it comes to the collaborative cloud. The myth that says that collaborative cloud roll-outs is just for small companies has been dismantled by most of the participants to the discussion. According to them, the truth is that the large companies have much more to benefit from collaborative cloud, both from a change management and behavioral change standpoint. And this because collaborative cloud is built on social media driven technology. It’s built to be intuitive, easy to adapt and easy to roll-out. Social media driven technology is designed to bring individuals together, communicate together, knowledge share together. The question is why would large companies step away from this opportunity. Some of the views expressed in the debate you can read here. But what is your answer?

I read recently that the general consensus is that the Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics in the cloud is a fast growing market, with an annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4% through 2013.
But there are some questions that still awaiting answers from experts. One of those questions is „Do I should move all the data, warehouses and associated processes in the cloud?” And this because at the moment, for the most enterprises, not only all the data warehouses are on-premise, but the majority of the business systems that feed data into these warehouses are on-premise as well.
The second important question is: „The databases can run natively on the cloud?”
The majority of on-premise data warehouses run on some flavor of a columnar database and the most Business Intelligence tools use SQL to access data from these data warehouses. So, the big problem is that these databases are not inherently designed to run natively on the cloud.
Finally, another very important question is: „How work on the cloud the I/O virtualization?” In other worlds, one of the major issues with the large data warehouses is, well, the data itself. Any kind of complex query typically involves an intensive I/O computation. But, the I/O virtualization on the cloud, simply does not work for large data sets.
So that for Business Intelligence in the cloud to be successful, what we really need is ability for scale-out block I/O, just like scale-out computing.

Cloud computing blogger Chirag Mehta and Constellation Research Group published a list of their cloud computing predictions for 2011. According to Mehta, the public cloud adoption stalling temporarily, the spread of the app store model in the enterprise, the convergence of Development-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service and an overall simplification of the technology landscape as some of the most important trends in cloud computing in 2011.