'Several PoCs For Content Delivery On Mobile Platform Are In Progress'

Biztech2.com speaks to Rajendra Menon, Global Marketing Director, Marlabs, about the evolution of BI in India and the company’s plans related to cloud and .Net platforms.

Marlabs India has been operational since 2000. How do you interpret the evolution of the BI market in India?

The Indian BI market has undergone a significant transformation in the last few years. Until recently, India was perceived to be somewhat lagging behind many other countries when it came to adopting business intelligence. However, as Indian enterprises became more global in their operations, BI started to hold greater relevance.

With the introduction of BI-on-demand, BI has moved beyond the realm of large enterprises into the small & medium enterprise (SME) market. Consequently, the Indian market has witnessed increased growth of BI platforms, analytic applications, and performance management software. There has also been a shift in mindsets from basic reporting to more detailed analytics for deriving insights to gain competitive advantage.

Marlabs has been catering to various verticals. Are there any plans to focus on certain business verticals going forward?

Yes, we intend to focus on a few verticals based on the overall trends in the US market. Healthcare reform is set to take off in a big way now that the US Healthcare Reform Bill has been signed into a law. The healthcare and life sciences sectors are expected to be major beneficiaries of this bill; we will be strengthening our push into these verticals. Also, utilities are undergoing significant transformation with the advent of the smart grid; funding from last year’s US stimulus plan has clearly helped. Therefore, we will be adding utilities to our target verticals. Last but not the least, the BFSI sector continues to be an important vertical; we will be concentrating there as well.

.NET platform is extensively used by Marlabs. Any plans on developing new products on the same platform?

With specific regard to .NET, we were an early adopter of technologies such as .NET Framework 3.0/ 3.5, BizTalk Server, SharePoint Server, SQL Server 2008, as well as the MS Compact Framework. As part of ongoing work in the BPM space, we have been able to extend Web-based solutions to work with the mobile/ compact platform, primarily for e-mail and notification services. Several proof-of-concept assignments are in progress for multi-format content delivery on the Microsoft Mobile 6.0 platform. Additionally, customisable frameworks have added localisation capabilities to some of our new product releases.

Are you developing any products on the cloud platform? How do you see this space panning out in India?

Indian companies are increasingly warming up to the concept of hosted and online services to reduce total cost of ownership. India makes for a potent market considering the presence of an end-to-end IT ecosystem with considerable untapped potential at every level, be it the enterprise, public sector, or ITeS sectors. While most vendors of cloud computing projects and services are concentrating on larger enterprises, the SME segment could prove to be quite lucrative. IT decision makers at SMEs are looking into reducing capital costs and adopting a variable, ‘pay-per-use’ model.

Going forward, cost reductions will continue to be a priority. We believe that there will be a transition to light-weight client machines running open source operating systems and accessing computing processes that run on the cloud.

Marlabs will continue to work on building products and solutions based on the cloud platform both for the US and Indian markets.