One of the fastest growing types of BI adoption is through Software as a Service solutions.  Organizations are looking at SaaS and comparing potential solutions to other in-house options. This means that more competition exists for solution providers as in the past companies looked at one type of solution over the other.  Now, the market place is saturated with many types of solutions and business applications without the clarity of which products are directly in competition or complementary to one another.  In addition to companies being confused over the types of solutions best suited to meet their business needs, solution providers are looking at SaaS providers and the use of on demand solutions in general as a new competitive factor within the overall BI market landscape.

Approaches to identifying how organizations are adopting SaaS include online surveys posted by vendors not within the SaaS space, such as the Klipfolio SaaS survey aimed at identifying how organizations are adopting SaaS.  It will be interesting to see in the next year or so whether SaaS adoption and services offered will increase within the BI space.