Is Business Intelligence as a Service (BIaaS) right for you?
BI as a Service outsources dashboarding to a specialized provider. When it makes sense to hire BIaaS and the criteria for evaluating a vendor.
If you work for or own a business that uses different systems to run its operations, such as CRMs, ERPs, project management systems, etc., it is highly likely that you or someone else in the organization spends way too much time pulling reports from each system, compiling everything into Excel spreadsheets for data analysis, or worse, for "routine reporting."
Do you know any manager who spends 8 hours a week pulling and building reports manually? I bet you do. If that person is you, it's worth understanding what Business Intelligence as a Service (BIaaS) is and if it makes sense for your current stage.
What is Business Intelligence?
Contrary to what many people think, BI is not a tool. It is the entire process, infrastructure, tools, and best practices to collect data and deliver the right information to the decision-maker at the right time.
This helps the company better understand its issues and make more assertive decisions faster, in addition to keeping employees aligned and informed so everyone can perform their roles in the best way possible, leaving guesswork behind. To start practicing business intelligence, you need tools to extract, transform, store, visualize, and analyze this data, plus someone's time to keep everything running.
Why Consider BIaaS?
Building the entire Business Intelligence infrastructure in-house from scratch is a costly process that demands time and effort from the whole organization: ingestion tools, a data warehouse, a visualization tool, and someone available to keep all of this running and evolving.
BI as a Service (BIaaS) is a model where an specialized third-party vendor delivers part or all of this infrastructure as a service, instead of you building and maintaining each piece in-house. The main benefits typically are:
Access to proven best practices, without having to figure everything out on your own through trial and error.
Reduced implementation time for infrastructure, dashboards, and analytical applications.
Lower implementation cost compared to hiring and building a full in-house team from scratch.
Continuous evolution, integrating new sources and developing new analyses on demand, instead of a fixed-scope project that becomes static after delivery.
Who Should Consider Business Intelligence as a Service?
A BIaaS solution usually makes sense for the following scenarios:
Your small team with the skills to build and manage reports for the entire organization has become a bottleneck.
Management information is slow and hard to access.
Accessing data is so difficult and painful that, even though the company has it, they choose not to perform the analysis.
You need to deploy an analytics solution quickly.
Your IT team is focused on other high-priority projects for the organization.
You already have transactional systems and track some basic metrics, but you need to distribute them to the entire organization in an agile way.
You don't want to make a massive upfront investment to get an analytics solution up and running.
The Layer That Supports Any BI Solution, In-house or Outsourced
Whichever path you choose—building BI in-house, hiring a full-service BIaaS vendor, or going with a hybrid model—there is one layer that needs to work flawlessly before any dashboard makes sense: reliable data ingestion from source systems into a centralized data warehouse.
This is exactly where Erathos comes in. Unlike a full-service BIaaS provider, Erathos doesn't deliver dashboards or ready-to-use analysis: we deliver automated, monitored data pipelines from your sources (CRM, ERP, marketing tools, databases) to your target warehouse, without requiring custom pipeline code to write or maintain. It is the foundation for both those building BI in-house and those hiring a BIaaS vendor, because neither works well on scattered, outdated, or inconsistent data across systems.
If you choose a full-service BIaaS, it's worth asking the vendor exactly how they handle this ingestion layer, because that's where most BI projects stall after a few months in production.
Frequently Asked Questions About BI as a Service
Does BIaaS completely replace the need for an in-house data analyst? Not always. BIaaS can take care of the infrastructure and dashboards, but interpreting the results and translating them into business decisions usually still benefits from an internal champion who knows the company's context.
What is the difference between hiring a BIaaS vendor and using an ingestion tool like Erathos? A full BIaaS delivers infrastructure, dashboards, and often analysis as an end-to-end managed service. Erathos solves specifically the ingestion layer, moving data from sources to the warehouse. You can use Erathos to build your own BI in-house or as part of a BIaaS vendor's stack.
What questions should I ask a BIaaS provider before signing? How they handle data syncs (frequency, latency), how they resolve data quality drops or ingestion failures, how long it takes to add a new data source, and what happens to your data and dashboards if you decide to change vendors in the future.
Do small businesses benefit from BIaaS, or is it only for enterprises? Small businesses are often the ones who benefit the most, precisely because they don't have the budget to build a full in-house BI team, and a service model helps them access best practices without that high upfront investment.
Conclusion
If your organization matches any of the signs listed above, it's worth considering a BIaaS solution, or at least first solving the data ingestion layer that supports any BI project, outsourced or not.
Create your free Erathos account and centralize your data before deciding which BI path makes the most sense for your business.
If you work for or own a business that uses different systems to run its operations, such as CRMs, ERPs, project management systems, etc., it is highly likely that you or someone else in the organization spends way too much time pulling reports from each system, compiling everything into Excel spreadsheets for data analysis, or worse, for "routine reporting."
Do you know any manager who spends 8 hours a week pulling and building reports manually? I bet you do. If that person is you, it's worth understanding what Business Intelligence as a Service (BIaaS) is and if it makes sense for your current stage.
What is Business Intelligence?
Contrary to what many people think, BI is not a tool. It is the entire process, infrastructure, tools, and best practices to collect data and deliver the right information to the decision-maker at the right time.
This helps the company better understand its issues and make more assertive decisions faster, in addition to keeping employees aligned and informed so everyone can perform their roles in the best way possible, leaving guesswork behind. To start practicing business intelligence, you need tools to extract, transform, store, visualize, and analyze this data, plus someone's time to keep everything running.
Why Consider BIaaS?
Building the entire Business Intelligence infrastructure in-house from scratch is a costly process that demands time and effort from the whole organization: ingestion tools, a data warehouse, a visualization tool, and someone available to keep all of this running and evolving.
BI as a Service (BIaaS) is a model where an specialized third-party vendor delivers part or all of this infrastructure as a service, instead of you building and maintaining each piece in-house. The main benefits typically are:
Access to proven best practices, without having to figure everything out on your own through trial and error.
Reduced implementation time for infrastructure, dashboards, and analytical applications.
Lower implementation cost compared to hiring and building a full in-house team from scratch.
Continuous evolution, integrating new sources and developing new analyses on demand, instead of a fixed-scope project that becomes static after delivery.
Who Should Consider Business Intelligence as a Service?
A BIaaS solution usually makes sense for the following scenarios:
Your small team with the skills to build and manage reports for the entire organization has become a bottleneck.
Management information is slow and hard to access.
Accessing data is so difficult and painful that, even though the company has it, they choose not to perform the analysis.
You need to deploy an analytics solution quickly.
Your IT team is focused on other high-priority projects for the organization.
You already have transactional systems and track some basic metrics, but you need to distribute them to the entire organization in an agile way.
You don't want to make a massive upfront investment to get an analytics solution up and running.
The Layer That Supports Any BI Solution, In-house or Outsourced
Whichever path you choose—building BI in-house, hiring a full-service BIaaS vendor, or going with a hybrid model—there is one layer that needs to work flawlessly before any dashboard makes sense: reliable data ingestion from source systems into a centralized data warehouse.
This is exactly where Erathos comes in. Unlike a full-service BIaaS provider, Erathos doesn't deliver dashboards or ready-to-use analysis: we deliver automated, monitored data pipelines from your sources (CRM, ERP, marketing tools, databases) to your target warehouse, without requiring custom pipeline code to write or maintain. It is the foundation for both those building BI in-house and those hiring a BIaaS vendor, because neither works well on scattered, outdated, or inconsistent data across systems.
If you choose a full-service BIaaS, it's worth asking the vendor exactly how they handle this ingestion layer, because that's where most BI projects stall after a few months in production.
Frequently Asked Questions About BI as a Service
Does BIaaS completely replace the need for an in-house data analyst? Not always. BIaaS can take care of the infrastructure and dashboards, but interpreting the results and translating them into business decisions usually still benefits from an internal champion who knows the company's context.
What is the difference between hiring a BIaaS vendor and using an ingestion tool like Erathos? A full BIaaS delivers infrastructure, dashboards, and often analysis as an end-to-end managed service. Erathos solves specifically the ingestion layer, moving data from sources to the warehouse. You can use Erathos to build your own BI in-house or as part of a BIaaS vendor's stack.
What questions should I ask a BIaaS provider before signing? How they handle data syncs (frequency, latency), how they resolve data quality drops or ingestion failures, how long it takes to add a new data source, and what happens to your data and dashboards if you decide to change vendors in the future.
Do small businesses benefit from BIaaS, or is it only for enterprises? Small businesses are often the ones who benefit the most, precisely because they don't have the budget to build a full in-house BI team, and a service model helps them access best practices without that high upfront investment.
Conclusion
If your organization matches any of the signs listed above, it's worth considering a BIaaS solution, or at least first solving the data ingestion layer that supports any BI project, outsourced or not.
Create your free Erathos account and centralize your data before deciding which BI path makes the most sense for your business.