“Maximum demand for BI from telecom and financial sectors”

In today’s cut-throat competitive environment, sound data analysis provides an edge over rivals—it isn’t easy to cater to customer needs and grow your business without data analysis. Sanjay Deshmukh, director of business development for South Asia at Business Objects speaks to Rahul Neel Mani

What’s the relevance of business intelligence in today’s context?

Companies generate data from various systems such as ERP, CRM or transactional processes. Companies today have to take more business decisions in lesser time today, and to do this they need instant access to information. This information when captured and analysed helps an organisation in making those crucial decisions.

Companies like Oracle, CA, SAS and Terra Data are also offering BI solutions. How does Business Objects distinguish itself from them and what are your plus points?

In the BI space, there are three areas that require technology support. The first is the data extraction area. Business Objects offers technology in this area through a product called Business Objects Data Integration. The second space is the data warehouse. In this space Business Objects provide solutions by partnering with other companies like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Business Objects doesn’t offer a database per se. The third area is information delivery. Once data is captured and stored in a proper format, non-technical managers can get information on demand. This is an area where Business Objects is the market leader. Here we provide solutions where business managers can access the database, send a query, analyse data and so on. The vendors that you’ve mentioned above are leaders in all other segments but extraction and information delivery. NCR, Microsoft and IBM all use Business Objects tools.

What about integrated solutions? Don’t they kill the prospects for standalone, best-of-breed products?

Let’s take the largest data warehousing project in India, at the Reserve Bank of India. RBI evaluated technologies in all the three areas of extraction, warehousing and delivery. They chose best-of-breed solutions in each of the three areas. Oracle was the database choice, Business Objects was chosen as the front-end for query reporting analysis. They did evaluate 9i, 11i, Discoverer, etc, but ultimately chose Business Objects. Organisations use disparate databases. If you have an Oracle solution for extraction, then it becomes difficult to integrate with other databases at the front-end. We are database-independent and can work equally well with Sybase, Informix or any other database by combine them into one single repository.

How does a typical business intelligence model work?

If the data is available in SAP ERP, we offer connectors called rapid deployment templates, which can connect to the multiple modules of SAP and allow easy extraction of data out of the system. If you have developed a system in-house in place of a branded ERP, you need to do some amount of customisation to get data out of it. Using our offerings, everything is done through a graphical user interface. Once data is available, then the user would use our software to ask questions and generate reports. These can also be comparative reports. Information analysis is what we offer with Business Objects’ front-end solution. It allows users to analyse data to a great depth. The same technology is used across industry verticals and the only difference is the kind of analysis that various companies do.

What can be done to minimise investments while getting the maximum value from a BI solution?

This is one area where Business Objects offers great value to customers. Ideally, the approach to go for a BI solution should be to extract data from different sources, put it in a warehouse and analyse it using BI tools. Because of the way our technology is built, it allows customers to use our technology directly on transactional systems, without having to build a data warehouse. We recommend this as a two-phase solution. In the first phase you can go to the transactional system and do ad-hoc reporting and some amount of analysis and create a structured data warehouse at the same time. A typical data warehousing project takes a minimum of six months to go live, whereas this direct solution might take three to four weeks to go live. For a user to get some amount of BI functionality, this is the approach. We have over 100 customers, out of which 70-80 percent are using products in this fashion. But they do have a long term plan to build a data warehouse, which costs a minimum of Rs 50 lakh. That’s where Business Objects presents a successful business model, which can be rolled out at a minimum investment of Rs 15 lakh.