Nasscom sees India among the top 3 destinations for analytics by 2025

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) recently concluded the fourth edition of its Big Data & Analytics Summit 2016 in Hyderabad. The focus of the Summit was driving business outcomes and customer experience by way of leveraging analytical services and products.

Growing at 8 times the current levels, the analytics industry is expected to reach $16 billion from the current level of $2 billion. There are over 600 analytical firms in India, out of which approximately 400 are startups and are positioning India as an emerging hub for analytics solutions for industries across the globe. The Big Data and analytics industry is witnessing a rapid growth driven by increased demand for cloud-based (SaaS) and predictive analytics solutions by industries such as BFSI, retail, telecom, and healthcare.

Big Data is not a textbook concept any more – it touches each and every organisation, big or small, in some way. Exponential growth of the number of devices, paired with the deluge of unstructured data – in the form of social media interactions, video or text – has ensured that. Being able to tap into this data and act on the insights, is a key differentiator between digital attackers and the laggards. The key to the future in leveraging big data technologies lies in the ability to harness its use in addressing complex problems.

Nasscom notes that this rapid rise of analytics is reflecting in job creation across verticals and functions with skills from analytics, business and technology. With over 90,000 analytics professionals in India across HR, marketing, risk and security, healthcare, and verticals like retail and finance, the industry is witnessing the emergence of specialised roles like data architect, data strategist, data visualisation analyst and change manager, among others.

“Multiple opportunities are emerging across business verticals and are opening up large opportunities for companies in data, infrastructure, software and analytics. Of special importance is emergence of custom visualisation software, development of algorithms for predictive analytics, cloud based services and Machine to Machine learning. The growth trajectory shows that India will soon emerge as big data and analytics hub of the world,” added BVR Mohan Reddy, Former Chairman, Nasscom and Founder and Executive Chairman at Cyient.

KS Viswanathan, VP at Nasscom believes India is already among the top 10 destinations for analytics and can feature in the top 3 in the world by 2025. He believes organisations today are realising the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and investing in utilising these algorithms in all aspects of their business. The industry will start exploring artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms for analytics and radically change product delivery to create new markets and engagement models.

Speaking to Tech2 at the Summit, Viswanathan says that finding the right talent to address this analytics revolution is also an aspect that cannot be ignored. He feels finding tools for analytics is the easier part. But leveraging the tools to make models and then driving insight from there is the bigger challenge that only the right people can resolve.