30 Minute Interview

The state of BI

Barrie Sheers, Senior VP and GM – Sybase Asia Pacific, spoke to Nivedan Prakash about the BI/analytics trends in the Indian market

Barrie Sheers

Trends in BI/analytics in India

As far as BI/analytics is concerned, we are witnessing a huge uptake in the Indian market and it is being adopted across verticals. In the telecommunications sector, telecom companies are providing value added services to their customers and that in turn boosting BI to a great extent.

Transport and logistics is another segment which has greatly adopted BI. For example, the Indian Railways uses BI to improve its passenger and freight services. Then there is the pharmaceutical industry, wherein BI is being used largely in drug research.

It is interesting to see each of these different verticals using BI in different ways to improve customer service, and efficiency within organizations. Basically, BI provides a competitive edge to companies using the technology for day-to-day functioning.

Growth drivers for BI/analytics

Organizations today are more competitive, and becoming more productive by developing various products depending on trends. This is pushing BI/analytics immensely in the Indian market. Moreover, BI helps companies in arriving at good business decisions.

Indian companies are able to scale their BI operations across more and more users. This is because the IT experience and capabilities of most Indian companies are extremely good in comparison to the rest of the world. Indian companies can scale BI across all the parts of their organization in order to attain more benefit and profit out of the business.

The market is still evolving and progressive Indian enterprises are adopting BI to overcome challenges resulting from competition and globalization, paving the way for increased revenue and profitability outcomes. Banking, financial services, and insurance dominates the market spends on BI software accounting for 35% of the total spend in the country.

Sybase IQ can help spot trends in the marketplace, provides intelligence to make the right business decisions, and improve customer-service levels, develop the right kind of product, becoming more profitable and broadening the customer base.

As far as BI is concerned, its role depends upon various verticals. In the BFSI space, companies use BI in making profiles on customer base, looking at trends of customers, etc. In the logistics and transport segment, BI can be used to identify the most profitable routes, to track freight, improve customer service levels, etc. Telcos are using BI for real-time analysis of their customer base, historical data, etc. So the use of BI is different for different verticals.

From an adoption perspective, 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.

Meanwhile, enterprises are making good use of the information assets available to them. So, large organizations that have invested in BI are making profitable uses of the investment in areas like customer management, financial management and internal processes.

Standing in India/APAC region

The BI market is quite fragmented. If you look at the components of BI, you either need to go for a one-stop shop wherein you get an end-to-end business solution or you go for a best-of-breed solution. With the kind of resource and capabilities Indian companies have, they require best-of-breed solutions and this is what favors Sybase and especially our IQ solution. It is the fast-performing and scalable solution in the BI/analytics space.

Today, we are into the magic quadrant of Gartner with more than 3,000 customer projects worldwide related to out Business Intelligence data analytics engine. In this space, we see ourselves as a market leader. The demand from various vertical industries in India is really pushing us more.

Here in India, we will continue our focus on data management, data analytics, and enterprise mobility.