RIP, On-Prem BI: Time To Bury The Past And Build Better

There was a time when on-prem BI was relevant. As a tool, it did its job really, really well. People were happy, proud even, to work with it. It had a great run, but I’m glad it’s fading now while it’s still at its peak.

It’s time on-prem BI died a hero, and let the torch pass on to the next generation.

The end of an era, the start of a reset

The death of on-prem BI didn’t happen overnight. Data started moving to the cloud when warehouses like Snowflake and Databricks took off, and teams realized they could now do things that they couldn’t do before. Prior to the cloud, data teams basically had to buy boxes and provision hardware. And if their data grew, they had to buy more boxes. It wasn’t easy to work across all those servers, especially when their data size exploded or the business needed faster answers.

It’s time on-prem BI died a hero, and let the torch pass on to the next generation.

When the cloud came along, people saw what was possible and got their hands on what’s, in theory, infinite compute. And once teams moved their data to the cloud, they started querying it—and realized that on-prem just didn’t work anymore. They needed something that could handle scale, or query live. Because when the warehouse has all the compute you need, why bother extracting and analyzing just a smaller slice? That’s when people started to realize: BI has to move to the cloud too. If anything, this shift was inevitable.

This isn’t just the end of an era, it’s the start of a massive reset. As businesses migrate to the cloud, this moment is a chance to rethink everything—how teams interact with data, where value is actually created, and whether legacy tools are still worth the cost. If migration is inevitable, why stick with the same stack? Why not question what’s right for each layer?

Hear it loud & clear: the future is in the cloud

Businesses are already moving away from on-prem BI for a number of reasons. Firstly, forced migration from the vendor is becoming more commonplace. SAP is winding down support for BusinessObjects while investing heavily in SAP Analytics Cloud, and partnering with Databricks to bring SAP data into the cloud. MicroStrategy will end support for on-prem in 2028 and is already pushing users to migrate to MicroStrategy Cloud, with a defined migration path in place.

The second reason is that many on-prem products are technically still supported, but they’re no longer improving. And while those tools may still be feature-rich, they were built for a different era and can no longer serve the needs businesses face today.

The future is in the cloud—and that’s a massive opportunity for businesses because they need BI now more than ever.

All that means that the future is in the cloud—and that’s a massive opportunity for businesses because they need BI now more than ever. They need to run on data. In fact, in the last two years, we’ve generated more data than in the entire history of humankind. With the move to the cloud, data teams finally have the chance to work with all this data at a more granular level and at unprecedented speeds.

If you’re querying like it’s 2010, you’re doing it wrong

When teams treat cloud migration like a simple tool swap—just lifting and shifting their old BI habits—things start to get tricky. They end up missing the point entirely.

Let’s say a team moves to the cloud, but keeps doing what it's always done. With most legacy BI tools, what that means is they’re still extracting data, pre-computing a bunch of aggregates, and then querying those pre-aggregated views. Even if they think they’re doing direct query, the way queries work in the cloud versus on-prem is completely different at the architectural level.

If teams are still querying like they did on-prem, they’ve moved tools, but nothing’s really changed. They spend all this money to migrate, but if they’re doing the same thing as before, they might as well have stayed on-prem.

So what happens? First, their data is stale and they’re not working live. Second, they’re now using their warehouse compute to power all those aggregations, even though they might only use them 1% of the time. Third, they’ve probably layered an unnecessary compute tier on top of that, just to query what they already pre-aggregated.

And that’s just the inefficiency. The real cost is that they’re not getting the benefits of cloud at all. If teams are still querying like they did on-prem, they’ve moved tools, but nothing’s really changed. They spend all this money to migrate, but if they’re doing the same thing as before, they might as well have stayed on-prem.

On-prem is gone, but BI’s best era is just starting

Legacy tools weren’t built for how business users actually work. They forced data teams to install five different things just to get to a spreadsheet. That model made sense in a world where data was scarce and static. But now, with cloud warehouses and infinite compute, there’s no excuse for that kind of friction. Enter Sigma.

If Gen One BI was built for analysts, Sigma is built for the business. That’s what BI has to evolve toward: an interactive layer, not a passive one. One that reflects how people actually work, think, and collaborate.

Sigma gives business users what they actually need: governed, spreadsheet-like access to live data they can actually explore, shape, and act on. It does reporting, sure. But it also goes further: letting teams plan, forecast, even write back data into the warehouse. Because business users don’t just read dashboards—they bring insight that lives outside the system.

If Gen One BI was built for analysts, Sigma is built for the business. That’s what BI has to evolve toward: an interactive layer, not a passive one. One that reflects how people actually work, think, and collaborate.

BI used to be passive. Now it’s participating.

The death of on-prem isn’t the end of BI. It’s the beginning of something better.

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