Integrating Business Intelligence Services in the Cloud: A Conceptual Model

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are among the popular applications that businesses demand in the Cloud. Although Business Intelligence functionality is already provided in the Cloud, vendors concentrate on providing existing products like Software as a Service, ignoring changing business and provisioning models of software. Business Intelligence functionality provided in the Cloud is lacking important integration features needed by other Cloud-based applications. While a simple upload of the data to be analyzed into a Cloud-based BI solution is already possible and well established, the visualization of the results and the interactive parts of the analysis are always provided inside the Cloud-based BI solution itself. However, as this chapter shows, common usage scenarios of integrated Cloud applications demand an integration of the analysis reports from BI applications into the user interface of other Cloud-based applications. This chapter describes how a fully integrated Cloud-based BI solution can collaborate with other Cloud-based applications. The technical concept illustrated with an example delineates how the required interface can be provided.