An impact of the burgeoning business interest in analytics is increased interest among small and midsize businesses to adopt a business intelligence (BI), reporting, and analytics strategy. In the past, larger organizations may have been willing to invest in hardware, software, and expertise to establish an enterprise data warehouse environment. However, smaller businesses have often lacked the budget, access to skilled professionals, or the determination to design, build, and support the necessary dedicated platforms.

Expanding the pool of organizations able to embrace a data warehousing and BI capability depends on:

• Reducing the complexity of instantiating an analytics environment
• Lowering the cost barrier to entry
• Unshackling business users from the information technology (IT) department by providing rapid accessibility to data using self-service analytics tools