I went to a Gartner session where they talked about the future of BI. The two items that stood our were:
- BI as a service - particularly as it applies to consolidating information in an industry and selling the aggregate back to the customer base
- Emergence of a Model Factory - building, packaging and selling BI models for a specific industry
My feeling is the implication is it is a valid business model for a subscription based (SaaS) model where customers upload their data and they get the results back through a portal.