BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: Adding Mobile IQ

The Indian
market is undergoing progression and an increased and intense
competition. In such a competitive market, many companies in India
are approaching towards business intelligence (BI) as a competitive
strategy for their sustained growth, where they can make quick and
important business decisions with the use of information much faster
and with less cost. India is a growing market, wherein BI vendors are
growing by more than 20% every year. Moreover, the organizational
energies are more focused in this direction. Hence, the need for
business intelligence tools and services has remained high in India.
Globally, there are various companies like Business Objects, Cognos,
SAS, Hyperion, Micro-strategy, which are known as traditional players
in the BI segment. Such BI deployments in any company are expensive
and used by only top tier management level, expert users, analysts,
and the rest of the 85% of business user pyramid is deprived of BI
for MIS, analysis and monitoring/gauge performances, which if
provided can help them get gain visibility into the business and
drive performance and getting everyone working towards a common goal.

GROWTH
RATE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

There is an
increased IT adoption by sectors like transportation, hospitality,
logistics and retailing. Recent market trends are the early adoption
of BI and the analysis of operational data at real time. Jenit
Ramaiya, CEO, Ambit Software said, “We are seeing quite a steady
growth in the BI space, with many business verticals like banking,
insurance, retail, real estate being early adopters. We are planning
to develop a dedicated BI unit to provide all the BI related services
for multiple vendor products.”

Ambit has a
strategic partnership with BI vendor MAIA-Intelligence, where it
works as a solutions provider for their 1Key Agile BI suite. It
provides installation and user training of the product. We also
provide services for developing reports, cubes and dashboards using 1
Key both on-site as well as off-site. Some important customers of
Ambit are Semco Electricals, Kuoni Travels, Indiabulls, Reliance
Capital. For Ambit, BI contributed to about 15% of its total
business. This is a 100% growth y-o-y that the company has seen.
Moreover, it expects 70% revenue growth this year from BI. One of the
primary factors for growth is the competition. Even the SMEs have
started to focus on having BI and planning for it early. The growing
size of the data in recent time is making companies to have quicker,
faster and accurate analysis of data which could drive decision.

Companies
don't look at 10 years of data but need their analysis for past 2-3
years of data because of changing market and business dynamics. Along
with the growing data size there is a need of master data management.
Although, BI is not a popular concept in the tier-2 SP space, but
over the year, several solution providers have turned to BI business
and have invested in a dedicated pre-sales, sales and support team.

Bengaluru
based Ganesh Mahabala, senior VP, Valuepoint Systems adds, “We will
be investing more on support/practice team to enable to get customers
maximum out of their BI solution investments and plans are in place
to grow our footprint in this space nationally and internationally.
In terms of driving forces behind BI, we are seeing an increased
demand for BI in our customer place. Customers today have lots of
data, but are unable to derive any intelligence report out of these
or the traditional way is becoming extremely time consuming, whereas
business is becoming more and more competitive and needs quicker
analysis and faster decisions. We are finding customers very
enthusiastic and receptive of the solution.”

Value point
has recently forayed into this space and partnered with QlikTech for
QlikView BI solution. The market for BI software in India is forecast
to reach the revenue of $65.4 mn in 2011, up 15.7% over 2010,
according to Gartner. Worldwide BI software market revenue is
forecast to grow 9.7% to reach $10.8 bn in 2011. BI ranked #5 on the
list of the top 10 technology priorities in 2011, according to
Gartner's annual global CIO survey.

“With the
maturity in the ERP and other business management systems, the
investment in BI is the next important need. More and more business
user driver purchases are happening, data discovery tools are gaining
market, like QlikView. Large business houses like Sundaram Group,
Aditya Birla, Reliance Capital, SRF, HDFC have all invested into data
discovery tools and have realized strong benefits in short time, and
there is a drive to expand usage more than the traditional BI
solutions,” highlighted Jatin Sawhney, head, information services,
Team Computers.

Sharing his
experience over BI analytics, Chandan Joshi, CEO, Phoebus Solutions
said, “BI is a new line of business for us, but we know it will
continue to evolve. There's still a plenty of room for growth in
the BI market. The BI market has only penetrated 10-15% of the known
user base, but there is a vast opportunity for BI well beyond today's
known markets.”

SPs
FACING
CHALLENGES

The main
barriers to BI adoption are cost and complexity, which restrict user
adoption and deployment across the enterprise. “Data migration and
integration becomes another most potent inhibiting factor to BI
adoption. Other challenges could be departmental silos, data access,
clean data, employee resistance, lack of business rules, etc,” says
Kolkata based Hemant Chabria, CEO, Chabria Infotech, the SP is
offering Microsoft Dynamics to its small and midsized customers.
Mahabala of Value Point, echoing the same sentiment says, “Before
us, the challenges are mostly the raw data. As these data are
available in an unorganized form and are from different legacy
systems, which make each requirement a unique one and complicated.

BI
implementations fail mostly because they are sold to the IT
departments and not to the
business users. The use case and RoI need to be built with the
business users. If that is not done, it would result in high
probability of self-ware, lack of RoI for the business user and a
pure IT project not driven by the needs of the business. Apart from
that spreadsheet (Excel) culture, data quality issues, over
dependence on outsourcing, lack of BI strategy are few challenges
companies may face during BI adoption.

Chabria
suggests, “IT heads need to understand all the activities that make
up a particular business process, how information and data flow
across various processes, how data is passed between business users,
and how people use it to execute their particular part of the
process. And they need to understand all this before they start a BI
project, if they hope to improve how people do their jobs.” Samir
Chokshi,director, technical, Sapphire Infocom, is a Ahmadabad based
solution provider, who is integrating BI with virtually any kind of
ERP like SAP, Tally, Oracle or Heterogeneous. The company is expected
to capture 35% of gross revenue from BI business in the next fiscal.
Chokshi says , “It was a challenge creating dashboards, KPI,
dynamic reports over SAP. Today, biggest challenge faced by solution
provider is about information flow within organizational pyramid.
Most of the information available are
possibly out of date and processed under batch mode. Decision makers,
MIS power users always strive to get correct information at
affordable cost and time.”

Some of the
customers enjoying the services of Sapphire are Cadila
Pharmaceutical, Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC), Neesa
Group(Cambay Group) Ramaiya of Ambit says, “In BI, the current
demand is for the availability of instant information, eg, data in
the form of reports at a click of a button with the ability to slice
and dice the data with different views. Moreover, customer needs
reports on mobiles/PDAs and in the form of dashboards, charts, and
graphs for better understanding.”

NEW
OPPORTUNITIES FOR SPs

Going forward
BI space shall definitely mature and open up. BI will meet the
demands of tomorrow's digital natives; integrate seamlessly with
cloud data and plat forms; align people, conversations, and data with
business strategy; and make the most of the infrastructures on-demand
BI, embedded BI, etc. This would be the future roadmap which solution
provider can gauge. In the view of Ramaiya, “Quite a few trends like
self-serve, real-time analytics, on-the-go data visualization,
and BI through mobile are shaping up in the BI space. All types of
critical decisions, buying, selling, monitoring, optimizing
decisions, are being made on the fly. This kind of 'on your tips'
decision-making, where the decision-maker gets access to a flashy
dashboard or a tabular report on a mobile device and is able to make
game-changing decisions, is increasingly becoming a major trend in
the BI space. Today, BI for everyone is an important aspect. BI no
longer remains the area of few expert users and analysts. “As
compared to traditional BI, 1KEY BI is simple to deploy, learn and
use in order to expand use and value. Business users demand the same
experience from their BI tool that they have come to enjoy with their
office like applications. The need for more intuitive and interactive
BI tools and applications extends to users on- he-go,” says
Chokshi.

Mobility
will
be an important trend in the BI space. It is expected that business
ownership will increase with the growth of mobility in the BI space.
BI on mobile features like drag and drop on PDAs, will bring the
paradigm shift. BI reports on mobile help upload sales data, stock
requirement and also to receive updates and reports on performance. A
sales trend, customer analytic for customer-facing personnel is very
quickly becoming a necessity too. Advanced analytic will be another
trend that will play a key enabler in turning data into insight and
this will accelerate as organizations strive to move from running BI
point solutions to being a comprehensive analytic competitor. BI is
no longer a 'nice to have' application. It has become a must have
tool. “The most important driver for BI purchase, we have come
across is, 'improved decision making'. BI capabilities have
evolved BI from an information delivery system to a decision
platform, and that has increased the value of BI and driven its
growth,” Sawhney of Team Computers concludes.

SOLUTION
CHAMP

In the BI
space, Delhi based Team Computers solution provider has emerged as
the solution champ. Its contribution has remained consistent and
remarkable in the last fiscal. Moreover, the company has witnessed
strong growth, with about 100% growth on YTD. In the last fiscal, the
company's bottomline contribution of BI has been over 20% with
about Rs 15 crore topline. This fiscal, it is expected to generate a
revenue of around Rs 25 crore. The company has done deeper
penetration into the insurance and manufacturing sectors, with
addition of HDFC Life along with SBI Life, Reliance Life, SAB Miller,
Suzlon, Crompton Greaves and Hindalco. With a total of over 135
customers, it added more than 30 customers last year, compared to a
total of 105
customers in the past 5 years. Some of our important customers
include, Reliance Capital, Aditya Birla Group, Canon, SBI Life, IFFCO
TOKIO, Royal Sundaram,
Fullerton India Credit, Shriram Fibres, Coca Cola, HDFC and many
others. Our recently added key customers include HDFC Standard Life,
SAB Miller, ISGN,
Renault, Carrefour, OnMobile, Suzlon, HDFC Ergo and many others.

It has
expanded into the US market with acquisition of key accounts in the
Bay Area and in the East Coast. Also, it has integrated QlikView and
Google Search into a single Mashup to provide integrated solutions to
customers. Back home, it is investing on having a strong training
program for creating more implementation skills within the company.
More importantly, it is setting up a BI School in Delhi with focus on
core QlikView delivery processes. While highlighting the future plans
for BI business, Jatin Sawhney, head, information services, Team
Computers points out,“We are putting efforts to grow our focus
substantially. In a glance, we have established CMM Level 3 practices
for the delivery of QlikView. Interestingly, Team is the only CMM
Level 3 certified partner in the world with certification
specifically for QlikView. It is launching QlikView expert services
to give consulting/audit/support and improvement services to end
customers as well as other large QlikView customers, who got licenses
through other vendors/partners around the world.”