To understand the role and relevance of business intelligence in Indian corporations we should first understand the need for business intelligence. A few years ago when ‘automation’ became the order of the day, every automated process began generating unmanageable amounts of data. A need to make business sense out of the data generated, and thus was sowed the seeds for business intelligence.
Representation of data from past performance, current position and future predictions in a systematic manner has aided the decision making process. Not restricting business data to the upper echelons of the management made individual business units responsible for their own bottom lines. The key lay in extracting useful information from randomized data in a format that an organization could understand and allowing it to sieve through the hierarchies.
Businesses in India are slowly realizing the importance of customer knowledge and targeted marketing campaigns. Mid-sized financial service organizations are now looking to make investments in areas such as identifying the right customer segment and marketing the right products to them. A single source of all data enables a unified customer view guaranteeing customer profitability tracking; defining cross-sell strategies and track risk and exposure at the customer level. This also permits enterprises to delve into relationship management and makes room for differential pricing.
Today organisations like SAP and Oracle are major players in this domain. But there are several other providers on the rise -- specifically, open source business intelligence software providers.
Traditionally BI has always been quite expensive for an organization to deploy across its entirety. This where open source BI vendors like Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Spago BI and Acutate, offering economical, yet competent solutions.
The BI market in India is still evolving as enterprises are considering BI to overcome challenges resulting from competition and globalization. And, increasingly, they are coming to view usage of open source BI solutions resulting in increased revenue and profitability outcomes.
Open Source BI in SME Sector
The Indian SME sector is adopting BI solutions at a faster rate than the large organisations. These are companies that might not have the resources to acquire big teams of highly skilled labor or invest in a high level of business unit integration.
Open source BI products figure high on their buy list. The same reason why an individual user might prefer an open source solution to a proprietary one applies here -- elimination of massive licensing costs and higher levels of customization.
For instance, Saama Technologies launched Pentaho's BI solution in India in early 2009. When quizzed about the launch of Pentaho's BI offering in India, the Managing Director of Pentaho's Indian partner company, Samir Dadia, said “The delivery of actionable information should not be limited to those companies that are able to splurge on their IT investments. The Pentaho open source alternative makes it possible to deliver enterprise class, scalable, information delivery platforms to even those companies with moderate IT budgets”
“With our experience of having delivered quality solutions to our customers in the US using Pentaho products, we already possess the required expertise for servicing the requirements of organizations in India which have invested, or are looking to invest, in the Pentaho platform” he added.
Inflated Expectations
A key challenge open source vendors deal with is the inflated expectations decision makers put on them, often confusing between low cost and zero-cost. Organizations need to also be aware that the elimination of proprietary licenses does not mean one need not to buy support contracts for the open source solutions.
Also, may even notice a slight increase in their labor costs if they implement an open source solution. This is because open source solutions does not always go hand in hand with architectural superiority. This creates the need for skilled software architects to stitch them together.
Organizations need to also be aware that if investing in open source is an option they are considering, they may even notice a slight increase in their labor costs. Open source solutions don’t always go hand in hand with architectural superiority. This creates the need for skilled software architects to stitch them together.
A recent report 'Economic Impact of Free and Open Source software – A Study in India' by IIM-Bangalore, highlights several interesting facts such as by replacing just 50 percent of proprietary software with open source in desktops and servers, India can save close to Rs 10,000 crore in 2010. Business intelligence software is one of them and enterprises that adopt an open source strategy will be able to reap the benefits.