Can you agree and disagree with someone at the same time? The quote below comes from Rob Ashe, general manager of IBM’s business intelligence and performance management unit:

BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS. Every company is different because even if transaction systems are the same the decision making process is different. Unlike Netsuite or a CRM application where everyone does the same basic things, BI uses a different model every company. The one to many model doesn’t work.

And while I agree with Rob that it’s the “intelligence” part that makes hosted BI difficult it is not impossible to provide BI as a service. Capturing the data model and sharing it with users will be a core piece of Good Data…