So will this all be worth the time and expense for your enterprise?

What a question, Pombriant says. "At the end of the day it's sort of like the old days when companies would ask, 'what's the ROI for putting a telephone on everybody's desk, or putting a computer on everybody's desk? Those questions were asked in a previous decade and we know how those things went. The people who said that they wanted to wait missed the boat."

covers Enterprise Applications, SaaS, CRM, and Cloud Computing for CIO.com. Follow Todd on Twitter . Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter and on Email Todd at You can also join Todd in the "CIO Forum" group on to talk with CIOs and IT managers about the things that keep them up at night.

in CIO's Business Intelligence (BI) Drilldown.