With the current trend of running the business on leaner budgets, organizations need to take cost-effective yet well-informed business decisions. Organizations have been increasingly turning towards BI and analytics due to ever-changing market dynamics.

Sanjay Deshmukh, VP - Business User and Platform at SAP India says, “Given the overall scenario, customers are investing prudently in BI. Most of them are doing an internal ROI analysis and looking at enabling BI for their sales and marketing units first.” Deshmukh also believes that integrating BI solutions with business processes and making this available on handheld devices will be some of the key trends that will drive the growth of the BI market in the forthcoming year.

Amit Agarwal, Associate Director and Practice Head – Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence, Virtusa, shares a similar view. “India is the fastest growing BI platform market in Asia. About 35 percent of the total corporate IT budget is allocated to BI and data management requirements. We have observed an increasing demand for low-cost BI solutions. Corporate IT departments are increasingly using the services of IT service providers to cater to turnkey BI solution needs. Models such as SaaS will help commoditize BI in the Indian context,” observes Agarwal.

BI solutions for everyone
Agarwal of Virtusa says that BI deployments in sectors such as BFSI, manufacturing, telecom and services will increase due to the high IT spending and customer volume seen in these sectors.
Deshmukh of SAP believes that with employees increasingly going mobile and spending most of their time on the field, a solution or a specific module should be made available on mobile phones and other handheld devices. Thus, instead of logging into a BI solution, a call center employee could look at having the BI application accessible as a widget on one’s desktop screen. Deshmukh cites other customer expectations such as the ability to embed real-time BI data into PowerPoint presentations and search capabilities with search engine-like interfaces.

BI over the cloud
A cost-effective approach to deploying a BI solution would be to deploy such a solution on an on-demand, as-a-service model. However, as with other SaaS offerings, customers are apprehensive about deploying BI remotely.

Says Ashit Panjwani, Executive Director, Sales, Marketing & Alliances, SAS India, “While everyone is talking about SaaS-based BI, it finally comes down to the organizational culture. With business information being sensitive in nature, organizations would want to keep such information within their network perimeter.”
However, Panjwani says that customers would first experiment with a SaaS-based model—before going ahead with large-scale investments. In India, SAS is looking at providing BI as a service and has already invested close to USD 70 million on a global scale for creating a dedicated infrastructure.

The OPEX model of SaaS can encourage many enterprises that have been traditionally staying away from implementing BI due to huge upfront costs. “BI is perceived to be a huge investment in the general context. BI-as-a-Service (BIaaS) can commoditize BI and enable broader adoption—particularly in small and medium enterprises. Fears related to data security and data portability are a barrier to adopting BIaaS. However, such fears will be reduced as the adoption of BIaaS increases—particularly in large enterprises,” concurs Agarwal of Virtusa.

Another big vendor in this space, SAP, is also making efforts to offer BIaaS and already has a BI on-demand solution available. While this service is currently available in North America, Deshmukh of SAP says that the company is looking to extend this to India in 2010.