Trends to Watch
Even though BI is establishing itself as a mission critical platform like any other technology adoption, BI adoption will focus on leveraging the investment in existing IT infrastructure and operations. With technology convergence, consolidation, standardization, and advancements at peak, the preference of the customer organizations would be to adapt to BI solution, which will result in overall optimal TCO (total cost of ownership). Joshi believes that the preferred choice would be to go for packaged BI solutions with organizations having ERP packages likely to implement the BI extension of the deployed ERP package whereas organizations having home-grown IT systems are likely to go for packaged BI solutions.

The future of BI involves things like consistency of information across the organization and predictive analytics that support proactive decision-making. "Combine this with some of the technology developments and infrastructure issues for instance, with Wi-Fi becoming prevalent, a user will no longer be tethered to the desk. BI is already mobile, but it is going to be more mobile and so the opportunity to get BI closer to the point of interaction will be realized," predicts Sen. Organizations will increasingly move from transactional database systems to implement fully integrated enterprise intelligence platforms that can disseminate intelligence across the organizations.

However, future trends suggest that organizations will not confine themselves to BI implementations only, and in order to extract maximum benefits out of implementation, companies would implement an entire corporate management suite, of which BI is only a part. "With the entire bundle being now affordable and seamlessly integrating with any underlying transaction system, more companies are adopting these solutions," says Arup Choudhury, CIO, Eveready.

The SMB segment, especially the mid-market segment, is seeing momentum in the BI space, believes Kathuria. BI deployments and usage is penetrating to lower management levels as well.

Most of the players believe that India will be the pioneer in active usage of real-time BI. "Indian clients already have the reputation of being one of the most demanding in terms of value for money, and we will see innovative usage of traditional BI techniques on non-traditional platforms like message queues," forecasts Ramaswamy. The success of BI solutions in India will be dependent on the acceptability of business applications such as ERP, and CRM among others. In short, organizations will increasingly move away from transactional database systems to implement fully integrated enterprise intelligence platforms that can efficiently disseminate intelligence across organizations.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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