Explaining the utility of BI for telecom companies, Sen says that with the right BI infrastructure, telecos can understand customer churn and take proactive measures to contain the same. Like retail, telecom companies too have to deal with customers and this is where BI comes in handy. "Therefore, BI can be used to track the sale of prepaid card plans in a particular area so the telecos can change plans to counter competition," says Santanu Ghose, country manager, Nonstop Enterprise, HP India.

Similarly, manufacturing industries can deploy BI for reducing their warranty claims and increasing accuracy of their demand forecasting. For the BFSI customers, BI can not only help in adhering to their regulatory compliance like Basel II, KYC, but also help them in their marketing campaign management. "We are also seeing great interest from other verticals like retail and the government for adopting BI for increasing their competitiveness and transparency, respectively," Ghose adds.

"Retail segment too is fast catching up," says Meheriar Patel, CIO, Globus Stores. "Deploying BI would help a retail organization in planning, forecasting, calculating risk, and taking steps to build efficient data architecture," he adds. BI supports decision-making, so any department that has to take large number of decisions will benefit from it. Also, when the number of transactions is high, one has to look at all transactions in consolidated form to arrive at any conclusion. Converting unstructured data into a more usable format will also be one of the areas where BI would help.

The prominent usage of BI in any retail organization is in areas like budgeting, assortment planning, analyzing sales data, trend analysis, and customer relationship management.

Vertical Adoption
Even though the underlying drivers across the verticals are the same, the challenges and expectations differ from vertical-to-vertical and so do the functions. For instance, the HR manager of a BPO company will use a BI tool to track the behavior, attendances, etc, of employees, whereas the retail sector will use it to keep track of their inventories and stocks.

The motivating factors for embracing BI would obviously vary from industry to industry and would, to a great extent, depend on the type of business challenges it faces. "Verticals like BFSI and manufacturing have been great adopters of IT and have made substantial investments in deploying operational systems capable of generating huge data that need to be leveraged for fact-based decision making to respond to market threats," says Sen. Today, the IT systems supporting the core business functions are in a mature state in these verticals, and, therefore, as the required foundation for existence of BI applications is already in place, the focus on BI adoption is growing. "The three functional areas where BI applications are getting deployed irrespective of the industry are marketing, sales, and financials," says Satish Joshi, executive VP and CTO, Patni.

The reason for BI getting adopted in these three areas is that their analysis provides the required insight for increasing the top line, improving the bottom line, and achieving the regulatory compliance, adds Joshi.

Banking, telecom, and manufacturing verticals have been the early adopters of the Business Intelligence technology. "Increased competition, compliance requirements, and increase in the scale of reporting in organizations are some of the reasons for BI adoption," says Kathuria.

The BFSI vertical was one of the first segments to extract substantial benefits by using BI tools in areas like risk intelligence to meet regulatory compliance like Basel II, KYC, anti-money laundering as well as in areas of customer intelligence for customer acquisition, retention, segmentation, etc. Moreover, the prospect of compliance regulations from the RBI on risk management in banks has increased the relevance of BI for the BFSI vertical.

Similarly, the manufacturing industry can deploy BI in areas of production and service intelligence for addressing challenges associated with warranty claims, demand forecasting, and inventory optimization. There is no specific reason behind the trend other than the quantity of data that these verticals have to manage. "And, the more data an organization has, the more they feel the need to effectively utilize this data. However, the BI adoption is driven by their stage of technology maturity and a BI system can only be successful if the underlying core systems are mature," says Ramaswamy.

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