Intelligent business

By Our Convergence Bureau | 03 Jul 2003

New Delhi: The business intelligence (BI) market in India is likely to witness high growth rate. According to National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) the growth is likely to be fuelled primarily by large- and medium-sized enterprises and multinational companies (MNC).

Presently in India, the market for BI tools is still in its development stage. Companies that have implemented applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), or data warehouses often face a situation where they have huge amount of data and information but no helping tool or clearly defined map, which can be put to use for making strategic decisions.

BI is an umbrella term for a set of tools and applications that allow corporate decision-makers to gather, organise, distribute and act on critical business information. BI comprises applications and technologies used for accumulating, amassing, analysing and providing access to data that facilitate better, quick and efficient decision-making.

According to Nasscom the BI applications include the activities of online analytical processing (OLAP), report generation, decision support systems (DSS), query and reporting (Q&R), statistical analysis, forecasting, data warehousing and data mining.

With integrated solutions such as BI software, companies can constantly and efficiently keep track of customers. Maturing product usages and increasing complexity of after sales service, customer support, and marketing channels has triggered companies to implement BI solutions.

According to Nasscom the following factors impact the BI market in India:

Growing customer needs: Enterprises now leverage BI applications and other analytical tools to get a better understanding of their customers
Increased level of automation across business processes: The increased level of automation of different business processes has created a need for continuous tracking of these processes and business functions
Maturing services industry: The Indian services industry has matured very rapidly over the past two decades
Low product awareness: Lack of understanding of the BI solution in many organisations across India is one of its most important restraints
High implementation costs: Implementation cost is one of the most important criteria in the purchase of any business solution
Managing organisation culture: Successful deployment of BI solution will require a change in the organisation culture rather than mere software implementation
Lack of positive testimonials: BI deployment is at a very nascent stage in India with hardly any full-scale implementation in place
Managing technology complexities: Due to unclean data existing in a large proportion of enterprises in India, integration, customisation and upgrading of technology are often regarded as a major hindrance.

Pricing
The price range for a BI solution is wide. It can run from $1,000 to $1 million. In other words, when spending, say, $100 for a complete solution, almost $45 will be spent on services, $40 on software and $15 on hardware. Some of the vendors operating in the Indian market are offering BI solutions priced between $1,75,000 and $2,50,000. Some of the other leading vendors in the BI space are offering products in the $50,000 to $30,000 range.

The Indian BI market is largely untapped. However, the fact remains that every company at some time will require this tool at different stages and at different levels of hierarchy, says Nasscom. To tap this emerging market, many vendors in India have started bundling BI tools with ERP packages. It is only a matter of time before the market begins to mushroom.