Innovative BI and Analytics to Help Start-ups Compete with Giants
Given the cut-throat competition and the survival of the fittest environment, the IT industry is looking for more and more optimization in a business environment. Business Intelligence and Analytics in the past few years has been considered as the topmost priority for a CIO according to several surveys and reports. Though in the past we have been hearing of companies such as MAIA Intelligence, SAP, Teradata, SAS Institute, Oracle, Sybase etc who have been focusing heavily on this market, we are now seeing a lot of start-ups that have emerged in India, focusing only on BI and Analytics.
As per reports from Gartner, the BI and analytics market has evolved gradually over the years and will continue to evolve in the coming few years. There are key trends that will shape up the business intelligence and analytics market. For one, the use of collaborative tools and social media has increased manifold and its application for all businesses across industries and verticals has become imperative. It is believed that in the next 2 years almost 33% of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices. According to IDC, the India BI software market is slated to grow at a CAGR of 35.9% during 2006-11 in India. CIOs are increasingly being required to invest in technologies that drive business transformation and strategic change. Smaller and mid-size organizations are becoming an important target market for BI vendors. Another positive driver is the use of BI functions in customer facing website applications as a value-adding service differentiator, using Rich Internet Application (RIA) techniques. While BI standardization projects are increasing, departmental projects are also on the rise, especially those provided by smaller horizontal analytics specialists and within emerging technologies, such as in-memory BI, search and visualization.
A number of start-ups have raised the bar in providing quality solutions in the BI and analytics space. Interestingly these companies through their breakthrough solutions have also achieved the distinction of making a place in Red Herring Asia awards, Deloitte Fast 50 Asia, and several similar other awards and surveys. Few companies that have been gaining ground in the recent past are Manthan Broadband, ActiveCubes, MuSigma, Enteg, Marlabs, Aditi Technologies, iCreate Software, and QlikTech who are now giving a tough competition to companies such as MAIA Intelligence, SAP, Teradata, SAS Institute, and Oracle. We are also seeing a lot of consolidation happening in this space especially from companies such as IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and Teradata to strengthen its position in the market. The start-ups in India now need to really build breakthrough solutions and provide a value proposition to the customers in order to survive in this cut-throat market.
Trends in BI and Analytics
Quite a few trends are shaping up this segment. Firstly mobility will be an important trend in the BI space. It is expected that business ownership will increase with growth of mobility in the BI space. According to Rajesh Varrier, CEO of activecubes, One of the key trends in business intelligence and analytics is the realization among organizations that BI and Analytics are 2 sides of the same coin. Another aspect is that India is a growth market, here companies are really busy growing 20-30% every year, the organizational energies are lot more focused in that direction. Hence for many organizations putting the right BI in place is still not on top priority.
Agrees Zubin Dowlaty, head of innovation & development, Mu Sigma, Key trends that are happening in BI space include dashboards evolving into cockpits, rise of agile self service, real-time analytics, open source maturity, pervasive analytics where operational smart systems are back propagating, improved data visualization, and business intelligence through mobile.
According to Maneesh Sharma, head, business analytics and technology, SAP India, Advanced analytics will be another trend that will play a key enabler in turning data into insight and this will accelerate as organizations strive to move from running BI point solutions to being a comprehensive analytics competitor. The market in India is expanding on account of increasing IT adoption across industry verticals, increasing competition and globalization. Indian enterprises are adopting these solutions in an effort to overcome the challenges of competition and globalization and to pave the way for increased revenue growth and profitability.
SAP acquired company Sybase sees the trend from an adoption perspective. Says Sudesh Prabhu, director, pre sales and services, Sybase, A strong sentiment that is observed is the need from customers to offload BI tasks from their transactional environments, to increase transactional performance, and improve analytical capabilities and functionalities. BI was mainly for executives, however today we notice traction in BI at managers level as well. This is the starting point of another trend which is collaborative BI, says Vineet Arora, MD of Aditi Technologies. The India market is growing fast, but still lagging well behind in a lot of these areas. However according to Rajesh Ramaswamy, global head, business intelligence practice at Marlabs, India might well pioneer another key trend that of building BI on a shoe-string. Be it agile BI or open source or self service BI or pre-packaged industry solutions, India is leading innovation on this front.
merging trends in the BI and analytics space point to a transition from a technology view to a business solutions and enablement view; which translates to the focus shifting from BI and analytical tools and technologies to vertical-specific BI/Analytics solution. Says Vivek Subramanyam, CEO, iCreate Software, At a technology level, significant investments are now being made towards incorporating in-memory functions in analytics applications. According to Rajagopalan Babu, Currently CXOs want BI to provide business expectations such as regions not performing, or products not performing as per plan. They are also expecting BI to provide them with patterns in the business, so that they can respond to market demand faster than competition.
Business is more of a business driven interaction and not IT driven. According to Ramendra Mandal, country manager India, QlikTech International, In-memory analytics, operational BI and dashboards, compliance, social media for BI, and fraud and security are few trends that will shape up the BI market in India.
Challenges in the Indian Market
There are several challenges when it comes to adoption of BI and Analytics. At the basic level it is increasing the understanding within the business on what BI/analytics can deliver and managing expectations on the same. At the next level will be the quality of data which is something that plagues organizations across the world according to activecubes. MuSigma believes that the challenges is in terms of being agile enough to integrate with various data resources. Enterprises still wrestle with the vital needs to get the right data to the right people at the right time. Blending the diverse data needed for business intelligence, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and regulatory compliance remains largely an unrealized goal according to Sybase. Cost of implementation, quality of data and adoption by end user are some key concerns for CIOs according to Aditi Technologies. According to Icreate Software a deterrent in starting a BI initiative is also the fact that business stakeholders will need to devote significant amount of time and attention to delineate the expected business outcomes from the BI solution. Enteg argues that BI and analytics implementation would require a good internal team which would define the KPI of the company first. An outsider cannot define business strategy using a tool. To define top management KPI, it may take anywhere between 3 to 7 months. Traditional BI solutions have become bloated, complex software stacks, leaving users confused and frustrated. Traditional BI software is difficult to use, expensive to maintain, and forces users through pre-determined thought paths according to QlikTech.
Cloud Forecast
BI on cloud is a much talked about concept. Cloud computing centralizes common IT systems or applications, giving many different users access to them via the Internet or an internal corporate network. Users do not need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud that supports the IT system or application says Venki Muthanna, founder and CEO, AppPoint Software Solutions, Given the acceptance of the cloud based delivery model, we also enable orchestration of business processes in the cloud which would allow companies to further enhance the SaaS based solutions by way of process automation, reporting, monitoring, analytics, which is termed as Process as a Service. Extending this model our tools enable integration of SaaS based solutions with those deployed OnPremise, which goes with the name Integration as a Service or IaaS. Most of the start-ups have already started putting a lot of thrust towards the cloud modelFinal Analysis
With competition growing fierce and the market poised well after the recovery, the start-up companies are giving a run for their money for the already existing players in this space. With CIOs looking for a solution that would address their concerns in terms of lowering their total cost of ownership (TCO) and CIOs focus on going for a company that provides core BI and analytics solution, start up firms have now begun to take on the giants effectively.
For and vendor quotes refer: (http://dqindia.ciol.com/content/industrymarket/focus/2011/111021501.asp)
Comments
Post a Comment