Is Your BI Strategy Cost Effective?

Have you looked at your BI spend recently? Sometimes, I’m puzzled by the enormous spending in “this is how we’ve always done it” initiatives that probably could be replaced and done much more efficiently with modern technology and cloud computing. I had a recent conversation with a Chief Analytical Officer of one of the US largest financial organizations. They have outsourced hosting of their 5 TB data warehouse to another company that charge them more than 100K per month. And this is just for hosting on a single SMP SQL Server with no fault tolerance and SLA in place!

Was he surprised to find that this data warehouse could be hosted in SQL Server Data Warehouse on Azure for well under 10K per month? Not to mention that besides x10 cost savings, they’ll get a Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) system on a par with Teradata and Netezza, with the ability to scale up and down with a click of a button? Further, the system will be fully fault tolerant with automatic back-ups. Add the flexibility that comes with moving to the cloud instead of being locked in a vendor that dictates what you should install and run? You’d be surprised how open to the cloud even financial companies might be after realizing these benefits. The same applies to customers who realize what they’re spending in overly expensive BI tools under the pretext that they are still “best in class”. They are not, trust me, and you’re being taking advantage of. It’s time to move on.