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BI: Business growth enabler

BI provides timely and accurate information to decision-makers across enterprises. Vinita Gupta analyses new trends and solutions in India—the fastest growing market in the BI space in the APAC region

The BI space in India is witnessing an interesting change. In addition to the conventional industries that are heavy users of BI technology (i.e. IT, banking, telecom and manufacturing), new areas such as retail and financial services are also keen to adopt BI. In fact, today we find several small and mid-sized retailers, brokerage firms, pharmaceutical companies, and financial services companies, evaluating BI needs for their operations. This apart, the market is also expanding to Government agencies that have now started adopting BI to manage spend, gain visibility into progress made and tracking internal processes and performances—all aimed at serving citizens better, cutting costs and exceeding organizational goals.

Gartner predicts Business Intelligence (BI) software revenue for the Asia-Pacific region to reach $399 million this year, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.5% to hit $577.6 million in 2011. India has been the fastest growing BI platforms market in Asia (including Japan). It posted a growth of 35.6% in 2005-06—from $12.1 million in 2005 to reach $16.4 million in 2006. All these figures are indicative of the significance of BI for organizations across sectors.

Moreover, in recent years, companies have invested in transactional systems like ERP, CRM, HCM and SCM—to run various parts of the business. These systems generate and capture enormous amounts of data, creating an opportunity for greater insight into business performance.

George Varghese, General Manager, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and BI, Oracle India, revealed that BI is regarded as the number one priority for CIOs across Asia Pacific as BI and EPM enables the management to link strategy to plans and execution, monitor financial and operational results against goals, and apply analytics to drive enterprise-wide performance improvement.

SMBs too produce tons of data, but lack the kind of analytic capabilities that would enable them to use data to make decisions, and they are hunting for affordable BI.

BI trends

From a trends perspective, organizations today are looking to institute more reliable and accurate processes for monitoring and managing performance both from a strategic and an operational perspective. IDC observes that successful implementations of business performance management (BPM) solutions such as consolidation and budgeting also include a robust BI strategy to integrate and deliver quality information.

Joyer Mascarenhas, VP, Asia Pacific and Japan Professional Services, Cognos stated, “One cannot deliver full BPM solutions without BI, and SOA is an underlying technology through which BPM is delivered seamlessly to the user community. This makes BI a crucial component in BPM and SOA.”

Pallavi Kathuria, Director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India, revealed another interesting market trend for reasons like faster decision-making and better performance management—organizations are making appropriate business data available and visible to all employees at every level rather than just the top management. Therefore, today BI deployments and usage is spreading broadly across organizations rather than being restricted to the top management.

Solution-based focus

Organizations also find it problematic to deal with different vendors, consequently the latter are moving from tools-based focus to a solutions-based focus.

M&A in the BI product space may make companies align with specific tools and technologies. The main reason behind this is that companies may want to align with the product vendor’s BI vision to get ample vendor support in product upgrades, product enhancement and availability of trained resources to implement the solutions. “However, there will continue to be companies who will support best of breed BI architecture to make the most of the individual strength of specific point BI tools for reporting, data integration, analytics, mining and making scorecards,” stated Ramanan R V, Head of Global Delivery and Chief Software Architect, Hexaware Technologies.

Ashit Panjwani, Director-Marketing, SAS India mentioned that CIOs today prefer to purchase their BI solution from an independent vendor and not an application or database vendor. He said, “Customers have multiple ERP systems and warehouses like SAP, Oracle E-Business, JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, Microsoft, IBM, and Teradata, and they have other data sources such as XML, Excel, and blogs. They also have a mixed bag of infrastructure like portals, security systems and application servers and as they acquire and merge with other companies these scenarios become even more complex. Customers need an independent performance layer that fits into their enterprise infrastructure and that sits on top of all of their applications and data sources.”

Kaushik Bagchi, Country Manager-Information Management, SWG, India IBM South Asia felt that customers are demanding complete solutions, not piece parts, to enable real-time decision-making. IBM’s broad set of capabilities from data warehousing to information integration and analytics, together with the recent acquisition of Cognos, position them well for the changing BI and performance management industry. The acquisition has also enabled IBM with technology that is based on open standards, which complements IBM’s SOA strategy.

User friendly

BI product space has seen a lot of changes in recent times. In spite of a growing number of M&As, BI remains difficult to implement. Lots of customers say that BI is really hard to use. They are not getting the value out of their investments that they have made.

Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence, revealed, “After having invested a lot in backend systems, less than 10% of their employees actually touch it, or get access to the data. Few BI customers have around six different BI solutions across multiple different departments, none of which talk to each other. They are hard to use, so BI customers have to send people to training for months to learn how to use it.”

Kathuria agreed that this is a hurdle which faces all BI projects and is therefore a key focus at Microsoft. She added, “We are using our user experience capabilities to ensure that our toolset is intuitive to use, needs lesser training and has the visualization capability which makes it easy for business users to make sense of the data and take informed decisions leading to faster adoption and greater impact.”

Sanjay Deshmukh, Country Manager, India/SAARC, Business Objects, a SAP company, revealed that users find BI applications very complex and this is the major constraint in the growth of the segment. He said, “We build products which are extremely user-friendly. We have a base search platform for all our solutions. A screen which allows one to find any information present in BI software, like Google.”

The success of BI has been dependent on the training of end users. “Hence BI should be made simple and accessible, and this is possible if people are provided the right training,” added Mascarenhas.

Bagchi asserted, “One of the main intent of BI is to enable problem analysis and resolution. The fruits of this concept, however, are often never fully realized. This is because many business users do not possess the skills and experience to use the BI system to analyze data and take action. Another approach is therefore needed to open BI to more users and gain full benefit from it.”

Data quality

The biggest issue in most BI implementations is the quality of data and the number of departments or locations that it has to be deployed in. BI’s ROI is strongly linked to data quality. Apart from the fact that data has cleaning issues, each application has its own data repository, and to do organizational level BI all this data needs to be consolidated. The other part is that only the right people with the right authority should have access to that data.

Data quality solutions been around from quite sometime but people have started using it now as its important for the organization to know how good or bad is the quality of data that they are using. To solve this problem companies need data quality solutions. In the US companies are already using it, but in India companies have started looking at it.

“Accurate business decisions depend on clean, accurate data. Today, information is being stored across multiple source systems and in inconsistent formats. However, with a consolidated enterprise intelligence platform, data can be read and extracted from heterogeneous sources; analyzed and used for sound decision-making,” said Panjwani.

Going unstructured

Business documents within the enterprise, syndicated sources of industry information, and the wealth of information on the Web all share the characteristic of being predominantly unstructured; that is, the content is mainly text, image, video, and audio. Unstructured data represents up to 80% of the data within an organization. Emerging technologies that allow computers to directly process content and extract meaning from it will enable new types of solutions to societal and business problems.

Imagine a pharmaceutical firm that can automatically mine the text in millions of technical journal articles, patent applications, and clinical records to find evidence that a particular disease may be inhibited by a proposed treatment. Such a capability could dramatically lower the cost and reduce the time to bring new drugs to market.

Kathuria said, “BI has also an important role to play from an unstructured data perspective. It could have a play in say, figuring out patterns on which links on your Website have the most clicks or from a perspective that a particular metric on your performance scorecard may need to be associated with a text based explanation or comment available on a text file.”

Last year Business Objects added text analytics to BI with Inxight acquisition. For instance, telecom companies and banks deals with billions of customers, and if these customers write their feedback to the company then it would be difficult for the organization to sort it out, this solution has the capability to scan through these various responses and also finds a conclusion that ‘X’ % of people are satisfied or ‘Y’ have problems.

BI in India is growing and vendors are adding new features to it. It is going to become even more mobile, and people will be comfortable with it. BI 2.0 is use of unstructured information, real-time analytics, semantic search, more collaboration and mobile platform, etc. The future of BI involves things like consistency of information across the organization and predictive analytics that will support proactive decision-making.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com