How you like me NOW?

As the software industry moves into the cloud, so does the next generation of BI software. A good example of this is a recent announcement from Cognos around their new SaaS (Software as a Service) offering labeled Cognos Now. The hosted service offers dashboards, integrated data, analysis and reports as a packaged BI service they are calling a "BI appliance." The recent acquisition of dashboard specialist Celequest provides the technology base for the on demand business. In their press release they claim to be the industry first to market an on-demand BI service… ummm, right. All "appliances" aside, this is the next evolution of the BI industry, you can almost hear the mouths of mid-market customers salivating. How will this impact the some of the other BI players, might we see more come from Business Objects with their crystalreports.com hosted offering, might we?