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If you perceived that BI has always been and is still considered as a luxury by Indian CIOs, think again. According to a Gartner research, the BI market is picking up in India, and quite rapidly at that. In fact, in our country, BI deployment has grown faster than highly mature markets like Japan. While in the rest of Asia BI sales went up by 16%, Indian market growth rate was upward of 35 percent last year.

 If one looks at the total market size in India, it was a mere $16.40 mn. The critics will obviously brush this aside as too small and insignificant for a country of Indias size. They will further dismiss this show as a result of growth on a very small base.

 I can understand their pessimism. It is important that a large, and now stable and mature market like India, should start leveraging all the information that they own and use. And, BI tools are the best solution for this.

 Wikipedia describes BI as solutions that provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, using current operational data, as well as data that has been gathered into a data warehouse. Without really getting into definitions, the end objective of these tools is to monitor and enhance business performance management. A lot of IT has already been deployed for processing and managing vital business information. But, is the information really being leveraged to the limit, has been a question that should now be seriously addressed.

 One area that vendors as well as the CIOs will need to do a lot of work in, if they want to introduce more BI into their IT infrastructure, will be creating user awareness. BI is still a black box for most internal users, and they will need to see its value.

 Another major challenge with BI adoption is the notion that it is very expensive, and needs a lot of time and money for integration with the business applications. That is not the case anymore; the deployment and payback is supposed to be much faster now. That needs to be explained to organizations that could be typical users. Interestingly, making full use of this uncertainty, most business apps vendors are now integrating BI features in their core products. This trend could continue.

 I do not think that interest in BI solutions by CIOs is out of any fad. The way business applications such as ERP, CRM, and SCM are being deployed to fight for survival and growth, business intelligence becomes essential. Similarly, because, with globalization, the need for regulatory measures regarding compliance, standardization, and right to information is being stepped up, BI tools make life for the CIOs and the functional managers much more easy. In the coming days, therefore, this market is likely to pick up and grow.

The author is Group Editor of Dataquest.
ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in

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