30 minute interview

“Business Intelligence is no longer a backroom operation”

Jim Davis Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer, SAS Institute Inc

The BI market in India is growing at 30 percent CAGR, which is huge considering that even the Indian software services market is growing at around 18 percent annually

*Do you reckon the time is right for SAS to get more aggressive in India?

As Indian organisations become more global in nature, the requirement to extract intelligence from raw data across multiple sources is crucial. According to our estimates the BI market in India is growing at 30 percent CAGR, which is huge considering that even the Indian software services market is growing at around 18 percent annually.

Organisations adopting Business Intelligence have to look beyond query and reporting. It is time that we changed the definition of business intelligence. Organisations should not be under the misconception that business intelligence is esoteric or an off-the-shelf product. CIOs should start looking at it from a strategic viewpoint.

*How has the market for BI tools evolved?

Current business analytics software comprises tools and applications for tracking, modelling, analysing and delivering data in support of decision-making processes. Recent trends in the business analytics (BA) software market have created a competitive environment where software vendors from different backgrounds find themselves in competitive and collaborative situations spanning extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), data warehouse management and end-user BI tools. As the BA market matures, vendors with the broadest scope will provide solutions that span BA platform and analytic applications. What’s also important to note is that analytics and statistics—along with other BI software are no longer the purview of individuals in the ‘back room’—the quantitative experts. Increasingly, we will find more BI tools in some form or the other in the hands of every employee.

*How is SAS Intelligence enterprise platform making a difference?

True business intelligence uses technology to bring information into one consistent view of the enterprise. When married with the ability of our software to help identify hidden opportunities and cross-discipline threats, SAS is capable of providing the level of business information that organisations need to compete and succeed. From a technology perspective, organisations need to drive intelligence across their enterprise and ensure that information can be accessed by the right people at the right time. The SAS Intelligence Platform not only aggregates and cleans data, but also stores this data intelligently and facilitates analysis and aids decision making. A particularly hot business trend today (and one very relevant to the evolving business intelligence market and to SAS) is the rise of analytics, specifically predictive analytics.

Venkatesh Ganesh