Escalating competitive pressures and customer expectations are forcing organizations to find new ways to tap internal and external data sources to achieve their business goals. They must also better understand how they compare and contrast with their peers from a performance standpoint. This means using key performance indicators to benchmark their success.
Legacy systems have proven to be too complex and costly to address these issues and achieve these objectives.
A new breed of cloud-based analytics tools are leveraging today's more cost-effective Infrastructure as a Service offerings to capture and process structured and unstructured data. More user-friendly, Software as a Service solutions are making it easier for corporate end-users and executives to collate and share this information to make important decisions better. Plus, a maturing set of Platform as a Service alternatives are enabling organizations to build their own analytics applications.
