SPS Grover, vice president, Technology Sales, Oracle India highlights the significant growth of the BI market in APAC and the emerging trends in the space in India. According to him, BI will become pervasive across the organisation, instead of being limited to business intelligence analysts.

How big is the Business Intelligence (BI) market in India and APAC?

According to IDC, India is the fourth largest market in Asia Pacific for business intelligence. Oracle is seeing strong interest in BI in both India and across Asia Pacific and has invested specific resources over the last few months in both sales, pre-sales as well as business development roles for business intelligence solutions.

IDC forecasts that the BI software and Business Performance Management and Financial Analytics (BPM) markets in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) will jointly reach at least $670 million by 2010. Major boom and acceptance of BI will be seen in the telecom and financial services organisations in India. Also, there is a growing trend in the retail segment, where the need for BI is being felt much earlier in the cycle of IT spend as compared to other industries.

The Business Intelligence software market in Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a CAGR (2004-09) of 13.6%. Licensing revenue for BI software is expected to rise from $2.5 billion at present to $3 billion by 2009, with the fastest growth in Asia and Latin America.

What are the current trends in the BI space in India?

Indian organisations are realising that implementing BI technologies allows them to make more informed decisions that are of strategic value to senior executives. Pervasive BI will drive the next wave of BI deployments. Within organisations, BI is no longer confined to specialised departments or the traditional power users such as business analysts and executives. Instead, BI will begin to pervade anywhere throughout the organisation where big or small decisions need to be made on a daily basis. Across the extended enterprise, pervasive BI will also put information in the hands of business intermediaries.

In India, companies in the financial services, telecommunications and retail sectors will see immediate benefits by investing in BI solutions. Companies are also looking for pre-packaged solutions that are tailored for specific verticals.

Explain the prominence of BI dashboards as decision support tools.

An often neglected by-product of business process automation is the operational data the automation system generates and accumulates over time. Log files, transaction records, document archives, and virtually any sort of historic data can become useful competitive tools if used to measure and improve a process. Recent legislation mandating strict data archiving has only increased the types and amount of data available to businesses. New techniques have been introduced in recent years to help companies make better use of that data.

Dashboards enable a customer to take large amounts of data in an organisation that has come about as a result of running the business, and look at it in a summary format. They can take key performance indicators for that business, and put that in front of executives to help make decisions. The key players in an organisation get access to information in a format that's easy to read.

How do you see the BI market shaping up, five years down the lane?

We expect the number of key BI vendors to dwindle simply because industry consolidation has been underway for some time already. The days of using multiple vendors for a single implementation are rapidly coming to an end. Customers are looking to their strategic technology providers to consolidate the appropriate technologies to provide a best-of-breed integrated solution that encompasses the data management platform, query and reporting tools as well as advanced analytics.

In terms of technology, we expect to see more powerful business intelligence capabilities in the database itself, allowing complex analytic functionality to be performed closer to the data instead of pulling large data sets to another tier for these functions. In addition, real-time decisions embedded in core applications such as HR, financials and CRM is another trend we expect the business intelligence market to evolve to.

Business intelligence will become pervasive across the organisation, instead of being limited to business intelligence analysts and the C-level users that they were initially built for.