By Rob Paller, Consultant
There has been a lot of talk about the growth and potential impact of Software as a Service (SaaS) in the realms of business intelligence, MDM, and to some extent data warehousing on Twitter and numerous industry blogs. The premise behind SaaS is to move the hardware and software from your data center into the cloud. By doing so you reduce the costs associated with deployment and maintenance of the hardware and software. Much like Google has done with your email, documents, and photo libraries.
Google is turns out to be a great example because of their partnership with Panorama Software. Panorama Software is helping lead the charge by providing one of the first OLAP services in the cloud. Using Google Docs and Panorama’s SaaS solutions allow you to create pivot tables or take your cubes from SQL Server and move them into the cloud for collaborative analysis. However, that has nothing to do with what is going on in the public sector and is best saved for another discussion.
Recently, one of our clients in the public sector has taken the concept of SaaS and applied it across the agencies and departments for many of the same reasons a small or medium sized business would consider looking to the cloud. Our client has established a group within its IT department whose purpose is to share services at an enterprise level to help drive down costs by reducing multiple contracts with the same vendors and standardize on the solutions offered. The solutions offered by this group range from data cleansing, data integration, business intelligence and data warehousing. Going forward, this group is also working toward establishing a master data management solution as they begin to address the requirements to provide electronic medical records. A substantial benefit in applying the SaaS concept across the departments and agencies is found in the reduced cost in training staff that transfer from one department or agency to another and reduce time to delivery of new solutions.
While the traditional SaaS concept may work great for the small and medium sized business the fact of the matter is that large corporations and even the public sector is less likely to make the jump into SaaS right now. Do you think the spin being applied to SaaS concept at this client could work for large companies or other areas of the public sector? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter.
photo by David Accampo (via Flickr)
Rob Paller is an expert at business analytics and database administration. Since joining Baseline, Rob has been responsible for developing a case analysis system to streamline the oversight of food assistance benefits, implementing a common citizen data model, and assisting in the rollout of a new public assistance data model integrating data from over 10 years of legacy with a new benefit eligibility determination system.
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