Larry Marion

The cloud computing/Software as a Service (SaaS) juggernaut is moving faster than you may think. Despite concerns about security, integration of on-premise and on-demand data and systems, and governance, large and medium-sized companies around the world are rapidly shifting some of their enterprise applications from their corporate data centers to the cloud-based servers of third […]

We’re entering the next phase of the Software as a service (SaaS) hype cycle. As famously described by Gartner many years ago, most new technologies start off with a lot of euphoria in the press and analyst worlds. Then, as the trade-offs, limitations and other negatives show up, the euphoria turns into a more pragmatic […]

Just when you thought you were finished developing interfaces between your business intelligence systems and client desktops, laptops and smartphones, another device category pops up and becomes the new coding emergency. Sorry about this, folks, but you now need to develop a strategy for tablet users who want to access business intelligence system data and […]

In case you hadn’t gotten the memo, the business world changed dramatically for the indefinite future after the financial market meltdown of late 2008. I’m not talking about short term cost cutting, but a tectonic plate shift in strategic business thinking in the United States, according to my analysis of a new survey of senior […]

In more than 15 years of interviewing senior executives about their business intelligence software implementations, I can’t recall hearing about a more badly mangled environment than the tale I am about to tell. And I can’t recall meeting a more candid IT executive than Dawn Conant, director of business intelligence at Beckman Coulter, life sciences […]

After more than a decade of researching and writing about business intelligence software, data warehousing and performance management implementations, I’m astonished that the same mistakes made in 1999 still occur in 2010. When I polled some distinguished experts to list the biggest mistakes they see when implementing these systems, they too say the same things […]

Business Intelligence software’s biggest emerging technology over the next year or two will be from the smallest devices. Smartphones like the iPhone and the Android can access online data stores, analytical applications and other parts of the business intelligence stack. This provides senior executives, field sales teams and retail clerks with real-time access to sales […]

Thanks to a weak economy that won’t be booming anytime soon, plus a potent array of top- and bottom-line benefits, the lure of business intelligence softwarehosted in the cloud has triggered many refugees from the mature vendors – and prodigious amounts of venture capital. So many companies have been launched over the past five years, […]

Business Intelligence software is changing rapidly as cloud computing offers greater flexibility. An industry observer reports: The four CIOs sitting on the stage of the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit 2010 in Santa Clara earlier this month were all early adopters of various technologies, and had the scars to prove it. One noted that providing […]

All the consultant talk and vendor hype about Software as a Service (SaaS), plus some of the widely promoted benefits, are leading to a major shift in technology implementation and spending. While there are some distinct differences in how large versus medium-sized companies look at SaaS, the overall interest in the key component of cloud […]