EAS spending will grow in 2010

After a 18 month long hiatus in EAS spending, enterprises will be focusing on BI & EAS upgrades in 2010 as large enterprises have stabilized their ERP investments and have huge databases that they want to analyze for strategic business decisions. By Rajendra Chaudhary

Most Indian CIOs will remember 2009 as a year that challenged them in every sense of the word and constantly required them to look for ways to reduce their IT investments. The changed economic realities of the past eighteen months often pushed them to a point where innovation was no longer an option but rather the only choice. Working with shrunken IT budgets and minimal resources, they were expected to deliver the goods and help the businesses ride out the financial downturn. While they did the best that they could, it wasn't always easy for them to postpone or cancel IT projects that they had planned for 2009.

However as the current year draws to a close many of them are revisiting those old projects, wondering if they can somehow get a green light for them in 2010 especially for Business Intelligence. Earlier this year, a lot of CIOs had thought of deploying BI related projects but due to budgetary constraints and massive IT cost cutting measures employed by most organizations, only a lucky few were able to get their projects off the ground. Nevertheless, in 2010 CIOs are planning to more than make up for the lost time. A considerable majority of the CIOs that we spoke to informed us that BI is on the top of their agenda for 2010 and that they are positive about getting the sign off from their management.

Hungry for growth through BI

For enterprises the world over BI has been the low hanging fruit for delivering business value for nearly a decade now. Although here in India the advent of BI in the enterprise consciousness has been more recent, there are a large number of organizations which are seeking BI tools that can help them exploit large volumes of business data generated by core transactional systems, and extract intelligent information thereby allowing them to take well-informed, more accurate business decisions. A quick analysis of the Indian BI market reveals that the interest in BI solutions is not restricted to large enterprises only but even some of the smaller organizations are keen on utilizing BI capabilities.

However the smaller companies are currently interested in simple reporting tools that offer basic historical reporting, dashboards and the ability to run basic queries whereas some of the more mature companies already seem to have passed that stage and moved into Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), which facilitates a holistic view and makes the data and process quality more transparent. It is perhaps Indian businesses' hunger for BI that has kept the domestic BI market going despite the harsh economic climate some would say.

According to Chandrashekhar R Sankholkar, Country Manager (Cognos), IBM India/South Asia, "BI Platforms, Analytic Applications and Performance Management Software in the Indian context is an expanding market opportunity as organizations are increasingly focused on leveraging information for smarter business outcomes. Over the past two years, the market has seen a strong propensity for BI platforms."

Further, Sankholkar informed that almost all the key industry verticals are witnessing strong adoption whether it is BFSI, telecom, IT/ITES or FMCG.

Ashit Panjwani, Executive Director, Marketing, Sales & Alliances, SAS India, said, “The sluggish economy has made organizations realize the strategic importance of having an intelligence strategy which would help business leaders with the capability to take fact-based decisions.”

New projects in 2010

Both vendors and businesses believe that 2010 will see an increase in the rate of BI adoption as companies try to compensate for the lack of BI projects in 2009. Talking about BI capabilities the majority of organizations are likely to go for in 2010, Sankholkar informed that using statistical analytics is a skill that is gaining mainstream value due to the increasingly thinner margins for decision errors.

"It is necessary to gain insights and inferences from the treasure chest of raw transactional data that so many organizations have now stored (and continue to store) in a digital format. Therefore organizations, at least some of the bigger ones, are likely to opt for BI applications with analytics capabilities. Additionally performance management solutions are also expected to grow in demand in 2010. Business users are also expected to opt for tools that offer forecasting and planning (financial as well as operational) capabilities going forward," added Sankholkar.

According to Panjwani the preservation of a healthy bottom line and identification and elimination of cost culprits was one of the top priorities for organizations in 2009. Leaders depended on the IT department for considering technology and solutions which could aid this objective and analytics had a major role to play in this area. In 2010, we see this interest generated in areas on analytics culminating in to customer engagement and the deployment of business intelligence and analytics solutions.

Challenges remain

Nevertheless, while there is a lot of interest in BI, there are certain barriers which sometime prompt even the most willing user organization to bail out on its BI agenda. Sanjay Mehta, CEO of MAIA Intelligence (one of very few Indian IT vendors to offer an indigenously designed BI solution called 1 KEY) said that pricing continues to remain a huge obstacle to enterprise-wide BI deployment.

"Deploying BI—for functional heads or member of the extended enterprise, can be a very costly proposition under traditional software licensing models. Additionally most BI projects fail because it’s too complex to deploy," said Mehta.

He also cited the issue of poor user acceptance of BI and said that unless the users start using the BI solution as they should and don't see a quick increase in productivity levels BI may not be truly successful in an organization.

Panjwani is of the opinion that the industry needs to work collectively to create awareness on the value which business analytics can create for organizations across various verticals which will alleviate some of the above-mentioned issues.

For many organizations 2010 will be their first brush with BI and when organizations embark on a BI deployment project it is important for them to get their primary objectives and direction right. When they deploy BI, it is important they not only look at areas like query and reporting but also strategic aspects like predictive analytics and forecasting that can help them with information about various parameters beforehand, and aid them with intelligence for fact-based decision making giving them that much required competitive advantage.

rajendra.c@expressindia.com