Self service enterprise reporting solution for data warehouse powered by SSAS

In a typical Microsoft solution involving MS BI and .NET, after the data warehouse development generally a BI development team hands over the next lap of development to the application development team. BI team and/or App team remains responsible for developing reports that are hosted within the proprietary .NET application and/or Sharepoint portal. The disadvantage is that, it takes away the self-service feature from the business users. When the requirement is "race against time", i.e. when one needs reporting solution asap which can serve enterprise class BI reporting on the top of your data warehouse or cubes, the selection moves towards ready to use reporting solution that can sit on the top of your BI artifacts.

One such solution is a product from Strategy Companion known as Analyzer. This reporting solution is said to be developed using ASP.NET and DHTML. Some of the features that I found pretty regular in line with what other such reporting products might offer are reporting using KPIs and indicators, drag-and-drop report creation, security integration with LDAP and Kerberos, different visualizations and gauges, integration with IE, SSRS, PPS, Sharepoint, Excel. But some of the features are quite impressive which any project would desire, and they are as follows:

1) Zero foot-print installation: Thin client is one of the most sought after requirements for any kind of enterprise wide client access. If you can facilitate your analytics requirement just using a browser, and still facilitate drag-and-drop report creation which for self-service report creation with rich report development features, it's very much favorable for any business.

2) Software as a Service solution: No business would want to invest straight away for a full fledged enterprise wide license, just based on an evaluation version, until and unless the product is a premiere class product listed in Gartner's report. Also small and medium businesses might want such reporting in an on-demand fashion. Analyzer provides the option for an SaaS deployment too.

3) Logic as a service: This is not a standard term, it's just my synonym for the term webservice. Analyzer features can also be used in the form of webservices, to embed reporting functionality in existing applications. This is a nice to have feature, but in my opinion, I would not recommend for this option. Instead there are better options than this, but still if you have deployed Analyzer for your enterprise wide BI reporting requirements, and some proprietary applications might be getting left out, this option can help in such cases.

4) Support for load-balancer / clusters: Analyzer can be deployed on IIS that is deployed on multiple servers and managed by a load balancer.

If I am given the requirement of agile DW development and facilitating reporting on the top of my MS BI artifacts, and provided that neither I do have enough funds to invest into ramping up a team to carry out a full fledged development life cycle nor I have time to wait for the availability of such solution, I would opt for tools driven DW and BI Reporting development. For the same I would pick up products like WhereScape RED for agile DW development and Strategy Companion's Analyzer for BI reporting. I do not intend to say that these are the best options, but these are definitely the two prominent ones.