Welcome readers.
This blog will contain my opinions, call them my biases if you want, on topics related to Business Intelligence, and Software as a Service.
My acronym "BIAS" for "Business Intelligence as a Service" is very unofficially what Oco (www.oco-inc.com) does. I say "unofficially" because I did not check with the VP Sales and Marketing before starting with this (Hi Anil), some other folks said "go for it", so here we are!
Lots of blogs I see are collections of snippets each roughly with content of "Check THIS out" containing links. You will definitely not get these sorts of items here. I will comment and link things when I have something useful to add.
Many people are curious about what makes SaaS such a good idea, and I have pretty strong biases/opinions about this subject. I am CTO (or CBO) at Oco because I'm a big believer in the importance of this evolution of computer technology. I will share the reasons why I decided to get into this specialty, and why I believe it will be successful and important in the marketplace. I think these reasons are relevant to people on the buy-side and the sell-side of this technology who need to understand its advantages. I believe many of these advantages are actually quite subtle and not yet well represented in cyberspace.
As for bias and non-bias: I considered posting this blog as some neutral sites where there are other bloggers on related topics. I decided not to go there because the blogs there have this fairness about them with respect to vendors, and the writers of them don't work for vendors, and so on. That is so not me! I am far too biased. I work at Oco because I'm passionate about what it does, the value that delivers, and I believe it is important. Yes, they pay me. I think everyone understands that.
That said, this blog is not a marketing vehicle. I take my reputation as a technologist very seriously, and I would never tell someone that what Oco has to sell is good for them to purchase unless I firmly believed this was truly going to make their life easier, solve a problem, or generally add value for them. So while my biases will be expressed here, you can be assured that my biases are for good technical reasons, or at least intuition that I hope is correct, and not just because it is what my company happens to sell.
So, that's enough of the caveats and "bias" puns....
Many people are looking at the SaaS trend today and want to understand how and when to engage with it, what it really means, why it's a good idea, etc. I've been in high-volume commercial data processing since 1995, and enterprise software during that entire period. I've seen the issues of enterprise software development (and it's achilles heel, QA, which will be a post "real soon now") and I strongly believe this hosted/cloud "as a Service" deployment paradigm is very clearly the way for companies like mine to deliver value to customers most effectively, and specifically for business intelligence applications to be created and deployed for businesses today.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you find subsequent posts useful. Please comment on them. Don't hesitate. Show your biases please. I'm convinced most people have good reasons for them.
