A cost-effective approach to delivering analytics as a service

Analytical solutions are considered as increasingly important for modern enterprises. Currently, systematical adoption of analytical solutions is limited to only a small set of large enterprises, as the deployment cost is high due to high performance hardware requirement and expensive analytics software. Moreover, such on-premises solutions are not suitable for the occasional analytics consumers. In order to accelerate the prevalence of analytical solutions, this paper explores the feasibility of leveraging SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) delivery model to provide analytics capabilities as services in a cost-effective way. The main contributions of our work include: (1) proposing a framework to enable enterprise tenants to consume analytics capabilities as services; (2) developing a method to enhance existing analytics platform to support multi-tenancy so that a single software instance can effectively support multiple concurrent tenants; (3) designing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) customization mechanism to satisfy the diverse analytics capability demands of tenants. A prototype system has been developed to evaluate the feasibility of our approach. © 2012 IEEE.