“India is one of the fastest growing markets for BI in the APAC”

Crystal Decisions’ vice president for Asia-Pacific, Lee Boon Huat talks to Abhinav Singh about how business intelligence (BI) helps organisations, its global potential and future prospects

Can you give some real-world examples of how BI helps organisations?
BI products help an organisation formulate future strategies. They help turn data into valuable information. With the help of BI products it is easy to access data from disparate data sources and incompatible applications across an organisation and turn it into valuable business information in the form of reports, useful tables, charts and maps that graphically present the information. Employees, customers and partners can use BI products to combine inventory, sales, production and metrics data with other information for strategic decision-making. For large organisations, BI products are helpful in measuring the performance of their employees, thereby helping them improve and perform better for the overall growth of the organisation. With access to all this information, organisations are able to make better business decisions and chalk effective future strategies. For example, a bank can provide its customers with all the information they require as a one-stop shop, which in turn helps in customer consolidation. BI products can be of immense help to telecom service providers, as they can help track the use of services by customers. This information when presented to customers can keep a control on the number of calls they make and help them chose a scheme that suits their budget and requirements.

Is the BI market growing and what are its prospects in the next couple of years?
According to the latest IDC report, the global BI market grew by about 10 percent and touched $2 billion in 2002. It is expected to touch $7.5 billion in the next couple of years. Traditionally the US and the European markets have been the largest BI markets. But if you compare the growth rate they are not growing at the same level as the Asia-Pacific BI market, which is the fastest growing market in the world, growing at a rate of 50 percent annually. The potential in the Asia-Pacific region is huge for us and we have plans to tap it significantly.

The Indian market forms 4 percent of the total BI market in the Asia-Pacific region. It grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 percent last year, making it one of the fastest growing markets for BI in the Asia-Pacific region. We are planning substantial investments in India in the next couple of years and plan to expand our presence significantly here.

Are Indian banks and telcos adopting BI like their foreign counterparts?
In the present times BI cuts across different verticals but it is the BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), manufacturing, telecom and the government sector that are adopting this technology in a big way. In India we have customers like HDFC, RBI and the UTI Bank in the BFSI space and Bharti in the telecom space. Some of our global customers include Sprint, Verizon and Telestra in the telecom space and Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Prudential in the financial sector. Besides this, we work with 345 OEMs who use our technology to build their products. These include Microsoft, Baan, SAP, Siebel, IBM, and PeopleSoft besides others.

What are your latest product offerings in India?
We have launched three different products in India, which include Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Analysis and Crystal Reports. Crystal Enterprise provides a reliable reporting, analysis and information delivery platform that helps companies make effective use of corporate data to understand and improve business performance. Crystal Analysis delivers guided analysis, which enables employees, customers and suppliers to gain insight into their business data to help them in making intelligent decisions to impact corporate performance. Crystal Reports provides a high-productivity solution to transform data into interactive content for integration into applications and efficient end-user interaction through popular formats and devices.