BI in the Cloud

Have you heard people talk about on-demand hosted subscription SaaS platform in the cloud grid computing?

Colin White wrote a good article that helps to make sense of all the different words and acronyms that companies use to describe these offerings - Business Intelligence in the Cloud: Sorting Out the Terminology

No matter what you call it, BI SaaS seems to be most suited to mid-size firms that meet the following criteria:

• they are large enough to need BI
• they are small enough to be unable to host their own
  
• the data they have can be provided to the 3rd party
  

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this being a large segment of the market.

SaaS is appropriate for applications that produce their own data (like CRM), but BI is all about tapping into the data you already have. It seems that BI SaaS gets a lot of hype, but let me know if you've actually deployed it and why you chose this option.