CLOUD BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AS A SOLUTION FOR EMPOWERING SMEs

Abstract

The concept of Business Intelligence has garnered popularity due to its immense predictive and analytical capabilities. It is being used by organisations worldwide to extract information from piles of data to take critical business decisions. However, such systems are difficult to maintain and costly to establish and are mostly catered towards large scale organisations. To expand the reach of this tool to organisations belonging to the SME sector which is quite significant in every economy and to allow them to contribute even more towards a nation’s growth and development, steps have been taken recently to provide Business intelligence solutions as a service over the internet using the cloud computing platform. This paper seeks to explore the factors responsible for choosing cloud business intelligence solutions from an SMEs perspective, the expected benefits and the associated challenges.