The BI space in India is witnessing an interesting change. In addition to the conventional industries that are heavy users of BI technology (i.e. IT, banking, telecom and manufacturing), new areas such as retail and financial services are also keen to adopt BI. In fact, today we find several small and mid-sized retailers, brokerage firms, pharmaceutical companies, and financial services companies, evaluating BI needs for their operations. This apart, the market is also expanding to Government agencies that have now started adopting BI to manage spend, gain visibility into progress made and tracking internal processes and performances—all aimed at serving citizens better, cutting costs and exceeding organizational goals.
Gartner predicts Business Intelligence (BI) software revenue for the Asia-Pacific region to reach $399 million this year, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.5 percent to hit $577.6 million in 2011. India has been the fastest growing BI platforms market in Asia (including Japan). It posted a growth of 35.6 percent in 2005-06—from $12.1 million in 2005 to reach $16.4 million in 2006. All these figures are indicative of the significance of BI for organizations across sectors.
Moreover, in recent years, companies have invested in transactional systems like ERP, CRM, HCM and SCM—to run various parts of the business. These systems generate and capture enormous amounts of data, creating an opportunity for greater insight into business performance.
George Varghese, General Manager, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and BI, Oracle India, revealed that BI is regarded as the number one priority for CIOs across Asia Pacific as BI and EPM enables the management to link strategy to plans and execution, monitor financial and operational results against goals, and apply analytics to drive enterprise-wide performance improvement.
SMBs too produce tons of data, but lack the kind of analytic capabilities that would enable them to use data to make decisions, and they are hunting for affordable BI.
BI trends
From a trends perspective, organizations today are looking to institute more reliable and accurate processes for monitoring and managing performance both from a strategic and an operational perspective. IDC observes that successful implementations of business performance management (BPM) solutions such as consolidation and budgeting also include a robust BI strategy to integrate and deliver quality information.
Joyer Mascarenhas, VP, Asia Pacific and Japan Professional Services, Cognos stated, “One cannot deliver full BPM solutions without BI, and SOA is an underlying technology through which BPM is delivered seamlessly to the user community. This makes BI a crucial component in BPM and SOA.”
Pallavi Kathuria, Director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India, revealed another interesting market trend for reasons like faster decision-making and better performance management—organizations are making appropriate business data available and visible to all employees at every level rather than just the top management. Therefore, today BI deployments and usage is spreading broadly across organizations rather than being restricted to the top management.
Solution-based focus
Organizations also find it problematic to deal with different vendors, consequently the latter are moving from tools-based focus to a solutions-based focus.
M&A in the BI product space may make companies align with specific tools and technologies. The main reason behind this is that companies may want to align with the product vendor’s BI vision to get ample vendor support in product upgrades, product enhancement and availability of trained resources to implement the solutions. “However, there will continue to be companies who will support best of breed BI architecture to make the most of the individual strength of specific point BI tools for reporting, data integration, analytics, mining and making scorecards,” stated Ramanan R V, Head of Global Delivery and Chief Software Architect, Hexaware Technologies.
Ashit Panjwani, Director-Marketing, SAS India mentioned that CIOs today prefer to purchase their BI solution from an independent vendor and not an application or database vendor. He said, “Customers have multiple ERP systems and warehouses like SAP, Oracle E-Business, JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, Microsoft, IBM, and Teradata, and they have other data sources such as XML, Excel, and blogs. They also have a mixed bag of infrastructure like portals, security systems and application servers and as they acquire and merge with other companies these scenarios become even more complex. Customers need an independent performance layer that fits into their enterprise infrastructure and that sits on top of all of their applications and data sources.”
Courtesy - Vinita Gupta, Express Computer
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