MAIA Intelligence To Offer On-Demand BI Solution

MAIA Intelligence, a Mumbai-based BI solutions provider, will soon be launching an on-demand BI offering, as per a statement made by its CEO Sanjay Mehta, during an exclusive interaction with Biztech2. The company plans to commence 1KEYonline.com, a Web portal that will offer BI software on a service model.

The beta version of 1KEYonline.com would be available by June-July 2009 while the commercial release of the same is scheduled for October 2009. Mehta informs that the company is leveraging the Amazon cloud (Amazon Web Services or AWS) to offer BI solutions on a SaaS model. “We were exposed to cloud computing in early 2008 with the Amazon infrastructure. We conceived the idea and created a blueprint to harness the cloud computing opportunity to reach and enable thousands of users with BI productivity tools,” he says.

With 1KEYonline, the company wants to accommodate thousands of users by offering ease of affordability without prohibitive software licence costs, a highly interactive interface, flexibility, intuitive reporting that improves decision making and access to any or multiple enterprise data sources.

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The company has been fairly successful with its flagship product 1KEY Agile, which is a hosted, on-premise application and is used by leading corporates like Tata Chemicals, Pidilite Industries and Reliance Capital.

Unlike earlier, with a SaaS offering, companies won’t need to buy and install the BI software on their servers, instead 1KEYonline.com will allow users to access BI reports and compute data over the Internet. Users will need to sign up for an account and will be charged on pay-per-use basis.

Mehta informs that 1KEYonline.com provides affordable and easily available infrastructure with specialised managed computing resources. These resources will be managed as to be ‘always on’ and ready to scale. This is in contrast to self-hosted systems, in which scaling up typically runs into issues of budget approval, equipment ordering, and operations overhead. Mehta claims that 1KEYonline.com represents an infrastructure revolution, moving infrastructure use from a capital expense to an operational expense and cutting the overall cost by at least 90 percent.

The company wants to start out by targeting the SMB segment as it believes this would be an ideal solution for start-ups, who want to quickly scale without massive investment in IT resources. In its discussions with partners and prospective customers, the company found that on-demand BI solutions are gaining special significance in the current economic crisis. Several companies are actively testing and enquiring about such solutions.

1KEY Online.com will offer many advantages to even larger enterprises in different verticals. However, the same may not be true for financial services companies due to their data security requirements. “I doubt how much they would be comfortable putting their clients’ confidential and highly sensitive information into a data centre owned and managed by a third party. In addition, the existing regulations make it very difficult for them to follow this model,” says Mehta.

As per plans, the company expects to start PoC at a couple of places by next month. Mehta believes BI-as-a-service (BaaS) can achieve the same effectiveness and quality as an on-premise solution with the understanding of critical customer needs in the BI segment. BaaS can be engineered by designing the slimmed-down version of information needs and prioritisation of key business user needs.

BaaS on cloud is expected to change the economics of business intelligence (BI). It will make BI available to all operational users for a practical purpose and will promote pervasive use of BI.