Pallavi Kathuria,
Director, Server Business Group,
Microsoft Corporation India Private Limited
It is pertinent to consider the nature of business intelligence (BI). There is no definite definition of business intelligence. As a matter of fact, BI is not simple environment. In its simplest terms, perhaps it is best to define business intelligence as some kind of knowledge gained by analyzing a company's data. "Business intelligence (BI) simplifies information discovery and analysis, making it possible for decision-makers at all levels of an organization to more easily access, understand, analyze, collaborate and act on information, anytime and anywhere," says Pallavi Kathuria, Director, Server Business Group, Microsoft Corporation India Private Limited.
The key is translating what a client wants into a technological solution. "Business intelligence has lately moved from being reporting based, to decision based and various technologies are available in the market today from different vendors providing this capability," says Pallavi.
"For example, Microsoft Business Intelligence Solutions (BI) are built on the existing technology investments made by companies such as Microsoft Office, so employees move from just being fed data to more relevant decision-making, helping the business stay agile and responsive," adds Pallavi.
According to Microsoft, BI market is expected to be around $30 million in the CY 2009 and will have an approximately market growth of around 20% of landed solutions at the end of CY 2010. According to IDC, one of the Top 10 predictions for India domestic ICT market in 2010 are: Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics will witness increased adoption as a part of the industry transformation in the post-slowdown economy.
Business intelligence software was the preserve of big enterprise. This has begun to change. SMEs are also becoming interested in knowing what BI can do for them.
“SMEs, for example, have begun rapid IT adoption into MRP/ERP systems and those that have used this system for two or more years have now begun to look for intuitive ways to analyze their data oceans - which is a ripe occasion for BI solutions,” states Pallavi.
Whether on-premise or in the cloud, Business Intelligence solutions offer several opportunities for increasing revenue. According to Microsoft, IT, Banking, Telecom and Manufacturing are all especially rich markets at present. “In the Indian context, IT, Banking, Telecom and Manufacturing verticals have not only been the early adopters of BI technology, but have also been effective users of MIS and Analytics.”
While these verticals are expected to continue to lead the implementation - going forward, we see immense opportunity especially in Retail and SMEs who have completed two-three years of ERP implementation as they are expected to become aggressive users of Business Intelligence. Apart from these enterprises, even key government agencies have started to look at the benefits BI can provide in serving citizens better services through analysis of existing data, cut costs and ensure more single views of citizen services being delivered.
For factors 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. As a result, today BI deployments and usage is spreading broadly across the organizations rather than being restricted to the top management. With organizations starting to view BI in a more holistic manner and realizing the advantages of deploying this technology among a large number of users, the market is, indeed, going to benefit from this significant change.
“Verticals like IT, banking, telecom and manufacturing continue to be our focus areas along with the increasingly adoptive verticals such as retail, financial services and insurance, and Government with e-governance projects becoming predominant in the current scenario,” says Microsoft. “Of late, we have also begun to focus on smaller ERP users and the upper end of SMEs which now wish to exploit the power of analytics and make their businesses more agile and responsive in a highly competitive market,” says Pallavi.
BI as a SAAS Model
Perhaps, the hottest trend in BI at present, however, is the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions from vendors. In fact, IDC expects spending on SaaS BI solutions to sustain a 22.4-per cent compound annual growth rate through 2013.
BI solutions, as stated above, deal with vast quantities of data that need to be extracted, transformed and finally brought into a form that helps users make decisions with it. Given that this data is huge, at times, it might be imperative to use an on-premise model. At the same time, if analytics and trending of data which can be easily analyzed on the cloud across a browser is enabled, this model will also work. It needs to be also kept in mind whether the BI outputs are required offline or online only. “Cloud opportunities for Microsoft channel partners from our Azure cloud platform are not just attractive technically, but economically as well. It helps the service/ISV partner when the base platform of Windows/SQL Server on the cloud provides much of the functionality you need to build a solution already there and you need to go ahead with tweaks, minor development and then the logical models to make your product/solution successful,” adds Pallavi.
Finally....
Notwithstanding the simplicity of the concept, half of business intelligence projects fail. There seems to be many reasons for this. However, one common reason behind the high failure rate of BI is the lack of understanding of what business intelligence actually is and who it is for.
This seems to be true since the start of BI projects in most firms are aimed at reporting, rather than intuitive decision-making. Most BI systems today are expensive and difficult to implement and this situation gets more complicated when we look at the lack of complete clarity from customers on what the end state of the BI solution should be and how the usage will benefit the organization.
“Many organizations restrict BI solutions to power users, limiting the effectiveness and also the ROI. This is why Microsoft follows a “Democratization of BI” which really takes decision making to the masses,” says Pallavi. Decisions are of three types:
1) Strategic Decisions: These are the "big" decisions that companies make (for example, should we buy a partner, should we enter a new market). The value of these decisions is large, but these kinds of decisions are not made very often.
2) Tactical Decisions: This has been where BI traditionally has been implemented. This is a product manager deciding what discount schedule to put in place or a pricing decision for a new product.
3) Then, there are operational decisions. These are the business decisions (often made by people that have never heard of "BI") that happen a lot on a daily basis - yet, they have smaller business impact when measured by themselves. However, in aggregate, multiple operational decisions add up to a lot of value - and can drive a better business.
Only when the BI solution addresses all the three, will the project be successful.
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Factors driving BI demand among SMEs
Governance and Compliance: The real need is for businesses to look at how they are progressing towards defined organization goals in boardrooms and what are the gaps which need to be addressed. Business Performance Management and operational reporting play an important role here.
Drive for Competitive Advantage: Making quick decisions with process efficiencies can provide key competitive advantages that customers need today to not just increase topline, but to ensure relevance in the marketplace. BI is being looked at as a key driver in delivering these insights.
Optimising Costs: In today's economic situation, organizations are looking at BI as a key driver to surface hidden cost drains and point to the areas where costs can be cut without impacting day-to-day operations significantly.
Surrounding Core Applications like ERP / Core Banking / Accounting: Most organizations in the enterprise and SMEs today have core systems in place and have stabilized them over a period of time. So once the transactional data is in place, the next move will be to look at how this data could be transformed into information and speed up decision making and performance.
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Contact Deepak Singh at
edit@varindia.com
