BI Customers Taking Small Bites

Business Intelligence (BI) market in India is predicted to reach $65.4 million in 2011, up 15.7 percent over 2010, according to Gartner. As investment remains strong in BI, it just goes on to re-iterate its strategic importance in helping enterprises cut costs and improve agility by enabling key organisational insights. Biztech2.com catches up with Maneesh Sharma, Head-Business User & Platform group, SAP India to discuss adoption trends in the Indian market and the drivers.

What is the state of BI adoption in the Indian market? How does the year 2011 look to you?

In the year 2008-2009, during the economic downturn there was still growth in the BI market. As companies needed to cut costs, they required insights, driving the demand for BI. In the year 2009 the uptake of BI continued as the market conditions also improved.

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BI has been among the top three projects in 2010 and it will continue that way in 2011 as well. While BFSI sector has been among the early adopters, other sectors like telecom, manufacturing (whether process or discrete manufacturing), automotive sector and industrial machinery are also starting to take off.

Traditionally what have been the business drivers for BI adoption? Are the drivers any different now?

Predominantly it has been about gaining insight into the organisation. Gaining cost insights, historical pricing, operational reporting (gaining insight into the business operations) have been the key drivers. The macro drivers are competition, regulations and risk reporting. The business drivers are the same. They haven’t changed much. What BI does is provide internal view into the operations. And, once the internal users start using these reports they start asking for more and expecting more. For instance, there are some standard templates and KPIs that every industry wants. We see enterprises demanding these templates. They expect KPIs from their industry made available to them. Thus, the way they want to consume the data and what kind of data they expect from the system would change.

Are Indian enterprises really looking at enterprise wide implementations?

Right now customers are not really looking at big bang projects but taking small bites. Enterprises are mostly doing it from a department perspective and then defining a set of KPIs. Some customers want to consolidate. The have done pockets of information reporting. And, now they are looking at consolidation from consistency of data perspective.

What is the trend with respect to BI on the cloud?

From the availability perspective, ‘OnDemand’ BI tools are available. There are also various free tools available. The concept is well appreciated. However, customer maturity for the cloud hasn’t taken off in India yet. Customers are still grappling with which applications to move to the cloud and which ones not to. The questions that they are trying to answer are that if they have BI on the cloud, do they need to take the data on the cloud as well. We see customers taking it up on a pilot basis. Hopefully, the debate should die down by next year. Thinking of the future, we expect companies to be publishing a lot of reports on to the cloud.

We expect a mix of both large and mid-size customers to go for BI on the cloud. Actually there are companies that want to try out BI looking at cloud, as they don’t need to look at infrastructure and don’t need to invest in so many things to start off. Overall TCO becomes lower.