Open source and SaaS solutions both can reduce initial costs and use subscription-based pricing model, and traditionally are considered to be alternatives to costly proprietary applications. Taking into account the fact that SaaS applications are very often open source at heart, then, what is the difference between them? An article at searchdatamanagement.com defines it.

According to Gartner and Forrester experts, the difference is seen when we speak about hidden costs, customization, and resources.

What’s hidden behind?

• The bitter truth is that initial costs are rather small compared to all the maintenance, correcting failures, addressing the occurring issues, and other support work. As Forrester research showed, the cost of open source solutions support may be high, because it is quite resource-intensive.
• The challenge with SaaS is, that though the support costs are minimal, in case of any downturn of failure, or any other trouble with the environment, company’s resources can’t fix it and have to wait until somebody from SaaS provider’ comes and helps. This is because a company has no full control of its SaaS application.

Demand for resources

• An expert from Gartner advices to address to SaaS in the situation when IT resources are pretty tight. SaaS providers offer, normally, packaged support so company’s IT department is free from the burden of SaaS applications upgrades.
• Open source solution demand for some additional work to be done to receive support from the open source communities. But this support includes many options:  updates, bug fixes, upgrades and enhancements

What about customization?

• Well, speaking about customization, SaaS applications are not the better choice. Deep customization is not possible for SaaS solutions. So, if an organization looks for a solution to suite its special needs, SaaS is not likely to help.
• The ability to fully customize makes open source applications appealing. Open source permits totally customize applications to fit any organization’s needs. Moreover, many open source providers offer on-demand and on-premise options. This gives a company more flexibility, for they may begin with using on-demand option, and as the use of the solution becomes more mature, it may be brought in-house. And there is no such flexibility for SaaS.

Right data integration and data quality are critical points for companies wishing to have fast time-to market and to manage complex sales and marketing programs. However, when budgets are limited it becomes difficult to cope with increasing expenses of data integration. In fact, the amount that an enterprise spends on Extracting, Transforming, and Loading (ETL) may reach the numbers of millions of dollars, what makes executives (especially non-ITs) clutch their heads in horror and spend sleepless nights analyzing whether their ETL data-integration technology is as beneficial as it is positioned.

Such factors as license costs, labor costs, and hardware costs drive data integration cost up. As the projects become more complex and amount of data increases taking a good care about data becomes more and more expensive.

Here are some best practices on how to lower data integration costs:

• Consider using commercially supported open source tools for your integration projects.
• Verify licenses to make sure the product you’re using is really an open source solution and the terms of license suit you.
• Openness of the source code is an advantage of open source over proprietary software. You are always free to view, fix, and modify the code to make your open source tool better suit your particular requirements.

However, think over all the pros and cons. License costs are not the only expense when implementing software. If an open source solution is difficult to learn to use or implement, you better think whether it’s worth it.

Look through our Guide to Reducing Data Integration Costs to discover more.

Hello!

As you know, we all were not created equal. This is the universal truth and it concerns those buying BI software as well. Not long ago Gartner has divided all BI software buyers into a three types and recommended potential customers to find out what type they belong to in order to mitigate BI initiatives risks.

“Those who fail to recognize which segment they are in — and the associated differences between vendors, products and best practices — will expose themselves to additional costs relating to procurement, integration, governance and, potentially, failed initiatives,” warn Gartner analysts.

Thus, according to Gartner, all BI buyers fall into the following categories:

• The first category includes those buying analytical applications with a narrowly defined set of requirements for departmental-level deployments form, mostly, SaaS-based vendors. Analysts, however, pay attention to the fact that such tools demand for quite sophisticated users. In other words, the buyers should think about end users’ training, including data quality and data governance education.
• The second category comprises the buyers deploying BI and data management technologies from multiple vendors enterprise-wide. The main risks limiting the success of BI investments, deployments and adoption for such customers are difficulties with mixing different technologies from different vendors, their customization to make them work smoothly together. The advice is to plan company’s BI architecture and manage the development of standardized BI technologies throughout the enterprise.
• The third category – those purchasing all their enterprise BI applications from a single vendor. On the one hand turning to a single vendor reduces IT costs of vendor management and applications development. While on the other hand, there is a risk that not all applications from the same vendor will communicate with one another on the metadata level.

P.S. Hmmm… interesting, what category the Apatar users belong to.

As IT budgets are still tightened, companies turn more willingly to open source BI software, claims an article at searchdatamanagement.com.

Of course, that doesn’t mean companies are throwing away their proprietary solutions and replacing them with purely open source ones. Open source software is a great means to complement commercial BI deployments and filling occurring functionality gaps. And in case when new business requirements emerge asking for appropriate new BI solutions in the conditions of exhausted budgets, open source software can be a savior.

However, there are still some fears about open source BI deployment:

• The lack of internal expertise for customizing OS software to interact with commercial BI software as well as underlying data sources and applications

• Open source BI vendors’ viability.

Well, the firs fear has sense, for without the internal expertise, open source BI deployments can quickly get out of hand. As for the second fear, however, is doubtful. Open source software, thanks to its free code, is available to large communities of developers, which means that even if the vendor itself goes out of business, the product is more then likely would still be maintained and even improved. The same can’t be said about commercial BI vendors and products.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems prove to be beneficial. They are widely been implemented and are regarded a powerful solution that improve provider-customer relations and help companies become more customer-centric.

Here are some factors to consider for getting benefits from CRM integration:

• System integration provider choice. – If you are not sure you staff is skilled enough for CRM implementation or integration work, you better choose professionals to do this for you. They may help analyze what functionality is more advantageous for company’s certain business needs. Thus it will help avoid acquiring bulky solutions, many parts of which will never be in use.
• End user adoption. – This factor is critical in the success of a CRM implementation, however ignore it. According to Forrester research, companies that achieved only 30% user adoption after three years saw only 5% ROI on their CRM projects. A lot of organizations don’t think about the right user training. Companies looking gain maximum benefits from their CRM investments should focus on additional user training.
• Real time applications. – Access to real-time information is highly important. Make sure you select applications that perform live data exchange instead of batch processing.
• System usage monitoring. – Consider monitoring usage of the system, either by soliciting user feedback, leveraging system monitoring tools included in many CRM applications, or investing in monitoring software.