SaaS is irrelevant to BI
There is some talk in the market about whether SaaS BI is viable. For example, Forrester is calling it unproven. Others aver that SaaS is the future of BI.

My view is that SaaS is simply irrelevant to BI. The arguments pro and con seem more suitable to discussing the future of SaaS ERP than to SaaS BI.

Forrester, for example, says there is a lot of skepticism about real time data transfers. Fine, but real time data isn't much use for strategic decision making anyway. Its study explicitly compares BI to ERP and ECM, neither of which play bs the same rules as BI.

SmartBiz implies at least that SaaS will make implementation times faster but doesn't offer any evidence -- lots of BI products are Web based anyway. Contrary to Forrester it claims that SaaS is better for dealing with large data volumes.

I suspect that SaaS is largely irrelevant to BI. A lot of the arguments pro and con seem more applicable to ERP that BI anyway. It may be that some SaaS vendor is successful in the market in the coming years, but it I don't think it will be because the vendor offers SaaS. It will be because it offers attractive BI features.