30 minute interview

SAS: the Present and the Future

George Varghese speaks on the current scenario of business intelligence, the SMB market where SAS in placed in the Indian BI market

What is the current business intelligence scenario in India?

The Indian BI market is pegged at $47.4 million with a revenue potential of $68.8 million by 2007. It is coming out of it’s infancy stage and in three years the market would be in a high growth trajectory. In fact the market grew by 43 percent in 2005-6 from 2004-5.

The Indian Industry is going through a phase of tremendous growth, and enterprises are growing either organically or are expanding their customer base through mergers and acquisitions. In a scenario of mergers and acquisitions, companies not only face the challenge of managing a larger customer base, but also of integrating disparate IT systems and technologies to derive a unified view of business activities across the enterprise. SAS plays a critical role in such a scenario by integrating data across enterprises and deriving intelligence to create a ‘single view of the customer.

What can we expect to see in the SMB space? How do you perceive their BI Usage patterns?

With competition growing by the day, it is imperative for an organisation, irrespective of its size, to leap frog ahead of its competitors. Business Intelligence technologies and solutions have become imperative for the effective and efficient functioning of any organisation as it provides timely and accurate information that decision makers across the enterprise need, to make strategic business decisions.

Operational systems across organisations have matured over the years. The key differentiator now would be as to how quickly these organisations can derive intelligence from data residing across multiple points in their enterprise and reduce ‘time to intelligence’ and therefore ‘time to market’.

Are there any specific tools that SMBs can look at? For instance, will they benefit by looking only at data integration first and then analytics? Which module do you think would suit them best?

The choice or deployment of module would depend on the business challenges which they are trying to address. For example if an organisation has deployed multiple transactional systems then data integration would be one of the key business challenges.

Where do you see SAS in the Indian BI market? What are the steps that SAS India plans to take to consolidate its position?

SAS India enjoys a leadership position in the Indian BI market. Frost and Sullivan in its recent report has voted SAS as the leader in the Enterprise Intelligence market. As per IDC’s recent BI tracker SAS again leads the pack in Business Intelligence Applications market. We are focused in retaining our leadership position by clearly communicating our value to our customers and aligning closely with our customers’ business objectives and partnering with them to achieve the same.

We also work closely with our partners who play a significant role in promoting and deploying SAS solutions for our mutual customers.

Apart from pure play vendors like SAS and Cognos, players like Oracle and Microsoft are also in the market. Do you come up against these vendors while bidding for a deal?

Today organisations have to continually find new ways to survive and grow — to respond to change with ingenuity and agility. To meet these challenges, companies are turning to business intelligence to derive more return on investment (ROI) from ERP (enterprise resource planning) and operational implementations, by unlocking the wealth of information stored in these systems. However it is important to understand what does true business intelligence mean and how can it add value to organisations in meeting their objectives.

Some vendors narrowly define business intelligence (BI) to mean end-user, ad hoc query and reporting tools — hindsight reporting of past occurrences. Others are simply referring to a data platform on which developers can build BI solutions.

By the SAS definition, a platform doesn’t offer true business intelligence unless it satisfies all these criteria:

• Breadth. It integrates functions and technologies from across the enterprise.
• Depth. It reaches all who need it, in a way that is relevant to them.
• Completeness. It is a comprehensive, end-to-end platform.
• Advanced analytics. It delivers predictive insights, not just hindsight.
• Data quality. It gives applications one validated, verified version of the facts.
• Intelligent storage. It meets the information needs of intelligence applications.

Collectively, these attributes define a platform that goes beyond BI to support organisational objectives of achieving genuine competitive differentiation. Its important for an organisation to consider and evaluate BI solutions based on the above attributes for achieving the desired business objectives.

Our Enterprise Intelligence platform, SAS 9 offers horizontal analytic applications that support enterprise intelligence, customer intelligence, supplier intelligence, supply chain intelligence, and organisational intelligence—as well as turnkey solutions for various vertical markets, such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, health care, retail, telecommunications, automotive and energy. These solutions are enhanced to take full advantage of SAS 9 Intelligence Platform capabilities, as well as to reflect innovation in their respective areas of specialization. SAS Intelligence solutions integrates well with various other technologies which would be existing in an organisations including leading ERP and CRM solutions, thus eliminating rip and replace.