Business Intelligence moves to the cloud

One of the most difficult aspects of cloud computing is dealing with the integration of various applications that run between your enterprise and a cloud provider or data center. Application integration is arguably the biggest challenge to enterprises attempting to adopt cloud principles.

Business intelligence has been the No. 1 technology spend for the last three years running, according to reseach firm Gartner. And, despite the the recession, Madan Sheina from Ovum has called BI a "recession proof technology." But nothing lasts forever and as with any other enterprise technology, BI can just easily feel the pain of budget cuts.

I spoke with Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile about the announcement to get some perspective on why this is just the beginning of full application stacks in the cloud.

The dirty secret about enterprise software is: it sucks. It's really hard to use and often requires additional resources for training and ongoing maintenance. This is particularly the case with proprietary software.

What our cloud BI solution will bring is an added layer of agility for businesses that want some level of analytics, but who don't want to wait months or dedicate resources to evaluating and deploying a BI solution.

If you want to start a new project, just fire it up. If you want to scale, we scale. If you're done with the project in a month or two, just stop--you haven't had to invest in significant software or hardware infrastructure costs.

BI is just one use case of how enterprise applications can cross borders. Realistically, not every application will (or necessarily should) go outside the firewall, but having the ability to do so brings about a wealth of new ways to add flexibility to your business.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.