As I research more and more into the world of Cloud-based BI, it is becoming pretty evident where we are headed. In my opinion we are moving down the road to an iTunes model for BI.   Yesterday I spent some time with Actuate in London looking at their BIRT On-Demand platform as a service (PaaS) solution (which is very easy to use). It was only a matter of minutes before I was up and running with a Mashboard.  A few weeks back in New Orleans I used Dundas Dashboard to quickly build a dashboard from pre-built components. Similarly Microsoft SQL Server 2010 has the ability in ReportBuilder 3.0  to quickly build up a library of components that can be dragged and dropped into a report.

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