Business
Intelligence solutions in India
The world is rapidly moving towards
convergence and a new business and connection paradigm is emerging:
c-commerce. C-commerce stands for Collaborative Commerce that means
optimization of supply and distribution channels in order to capitalize
upon the global economy and use new technology efficiently.
Collaboration promotes fresh views of
suppliers, competitors, and customers. The goal is for a business to
move away from production and sales, shifting towards the integration of
various businesses. Technology and services for enterprise knowledge
management will evolve to support the extended, collaborative
enterprise. This will bring in a flood of information. Surviving the
information flood and effectively managing it will be a critical success
factor for enterprises to survive and have a distinct competitive edge.
In a c-commerce business world 'knowledge and information' will be the
basis for giving an enterprise its competitive edge. And Business
Intelligence provides the foundation on which C-Commerce rests .
So what is Business intelligence? Business
intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies
for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help
enterprise users make better business decisions. Business intelligence
solutions help a company in making business decisions faster, accurate
and market-oriented. Concept of business intelligence is new in India
and according to Gourish Hosangady, it is 'limited to either a
traditional database analysis tool or mistaken for a concept similar to
market intelligence. '' Business intelligence market in India was very
small at the beginning of this millennium. According to Frost & Sullivan
report on the Business Intelligence market in India, wherein Business
Intelligence has been categorized to include query & reporting tools,
data warehousing & mining technologies, and business performance
management- the BI market was estimated at Rs. 26 crore ($ 6 million
approx) for Jan-Dec 2001 and increased by 40-45 percent in 2002, to
approximately Rs. 37.5 crore ($10 million approx.)'. The Business
Intelligence market in India could be in the range of $32-35 million by
2005. The Asia-Pacific market for BI solutions is estimated to be $1
billion by 2007, according to analyst Gartner. There has been a slow but
steady growth of Business Intelligence market in India. A growing number
of vendors are delivering products that are more of a solution and less
of a tool. Vendor software have become more closely intertwined with
business processes. Recently (September 2004) Microsoft Corporation
India launched business intelligence accelerator that would streamline
its Business Intelligence solutions implementation in the banking,
finance, manufacturing and retail sectors. Sanjiv Mathur, group manager,
Microsoft India told that "Business Intelligence Accelerator is a set of
tools and technologies that streamline BI implementation in companies".
Mathur also said that "Globally, we lead the Online Analytical
Processing Servers (OLAP) vendors pack and are confident that the value
proposition of the Microsoft platform would ensure our success in India
as well". According to Tarun Mallick, product marketing manager,
Microsoft India "By providing RDBMS (Relational Data Base Management
Systems), which is a repository of data with rich OLAP functionality
along with reporting services, we have the ability to take BI to the
customers' fingertips". With big international players like Microsoft
entering the field outlook is positive for further growth of Business
Intelligence in India. |