Rapids Self Service: Fill & Download for Free

yes and noif you consider the NIST definition for Cloud Computing, where the defining characteristics are:rapid elasticitymeasured serviceon-demand self serviceubiquitous network accessresource poolingthen measured service and resource pooling are indeed common for both approaches, but the rest -- rapid elasticity, on-demand self service and ubiquitous network access -- are differentiating characteristics of Cloud Computing

Thanks for A2A!In my opinion, there are 2 major development areas for SaaS that occurred in 2016.SaaS turning into PaaS! With thousands of new products on the market, many industries (including customer support, online sales, healthcare and productivity) became extremely competitive. That forced established SaaS companies to provide an additional value to their customers in order to keep the customer retention ratio high. What many of them focused on in 2016 was the creation of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities, allowing customers to create and distribute add-on apps for their major product. At LiveChat we actually saw this coming long time ago. Our customers are provided with an easy access to REST API & webhooks documentation. Thereby they can attach our software to whatever tool they fancy to expand its capabilities even more or build integrations of their own.The rise of self-service tools. In 2016 consumers were given more and more tools to handle easy-to-resolve cases themselves. So-called self-service solutions (online communities of engaged customers & knowledge bases) were developed rapidly to provide consistent and personalized customer support and answer consumers’ empowerment demands. Companies finally seem to understand that an investment in self -service tools can bring them significant ROI in form of an enhanced customer support and higher customer retention ratio.In fact, we’ve been developing our knowledge base for years now. If you’re interested about the process we went through with it, feel free to check its in-depth analysis on our blog.

BI solutions cannot be simply divided into two groups. The combinations of BI approaches keep pace with the number of companies. Distinguishing between traditional and self-service BI helps to simplify the choice of techniques to use and helps with understanding.Traditional BI Solutions are powerful, and backed by well established software companies like SAP Business Objects/Crystal Reports, IBM Cognos, Oracle BI, and Qlikview.Pros: able of implementing any demand, scalability, reliability, data security.Cons: requires good general IT knowledge as well as certain BI tool skills. Takes time to settle up.Self-Service BI Solutions tend to be products of newer companies that are leveraging many of the strengths of web based technology. Agile solutions are designed to rapidly adapt to changing business needs. Examples of agile solutions include Sisense, Yurbi, Tableau, and Domo.Pros: fast, easy to setup, easy to use, less technical knowledge is needed, work fine for small companies, lower priceCons: can be problems with scalability.The key difference for a user is a possibility of using Self-Service BI by both BI professionals and business users, because the people with not much understanding of Business Intelligence can do it. Also, SSBI is a crucial possibility in case of a small company, or the one that does not have budget or need of BI department.