Business Intelligence as a Managed Service: Ripe Opportunity?

Business intelligence. Yawn. A lot of VARs don’t have much interest in the BI market — and even fewer offer BI as a managed service or software as a service (SaaS). Until recently, BI was mostly an opportunity for large integrators targeting big enterprises. But that’s changing.

Yesterday, I mentioned a hosted BI solution from Daptiv, a Seattle-based solutions provider that works closely with Cognos. Today, I spotted a similar offering from Blink Logic Inc., which specializes in on-demand BI solutions. The rise of on-demand BI could be an interesting niche for solutions providers who already have experience with database and CRM-type software.

Blink Logic recently landed a deal to provide hosted BI solutions to Fieldpoint Service Applications Inc. It’s an interesting relationship, because Fieldpoint specializes in help desk, field service, contracts and project management software. If you apply the Blink Logic-Fieldpoint relationship to the VAR market, one could imagine a VAR extending its managed help desk services with BI capabilities.