Why has Standalone Cloud BI Been Such a Tough Slog?

I remember when I left Business Objects back in 2004 that it was early days in the cloud.  We were using Salesforce internally (and one of their larger customers at the time) so I was familiar with and a proponent of cloud-based applications, but never felt great about BI in the cloud.  Despite that, Business Objects and others were aggressively ramping on-demand offerings all of which amounted to pretty much nothing a few years later.

These were great people — Brad, Ken, Roman, and others were smart, well educated veterans who knew the software business and their market space.

These were great investors — names like Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Emergence, Matrix, Sequoia, StarVest, and Tenaya invested over $300M in those four companies alone.

This was theoretically a great, straightforward cloud-transformation play of a $10B+ market, a la Siebel to Salesforce.

But of the four companies named above only GoodData is doing well and still in the fight (with a high-end enterprise platform strategy that bears little resemblance to a straight cloud transformation play) and the three others all came to uneventful exits:

Meantime, recall that Tableau, founded in 2003, and armed in its early years with a measly $15M in venture capital, and with an exclusively on-premises business model, literally blew by all the cloud BI vendors, going public in May 2013 and despite the stock being cut by more than half since its July 2015 peak is still worth $4.2B today.

I can’t claim to have the definitive answer to the question I’ve posed in the title.  In the early days I thought it was related to technical issues like trust/security, trust/scale, and the complexities of cloud-based data integration.  But those aren’t issues today.  For a while back in the day I thought maybe the cloud was great for applications, but perhaps not for platforms or infrastructure.  While SaaS was the first cloud category to take off, we’ve obviously seen enormous success with both platforms (PaaS) and infrastructure (IaaS) in the cloud, so that can’t be it.

While some analysts lump EPM under BI, cloud-based EPM has not had similar troubles.  At Host, and our top competitors, we have never struggled with focus or positioning and we are all basically running slightly different variations on the standard cloud transformation play.  I’ve always believed that lumping EPM under BI is a mistake because while they use similar technologies, they are sold to different buyers (IT vs. finance) and the value proposition is totally different (tool vs. application).