India-APAC's Fastest Growing BI Platforms Market: Gartner

In APAC (including Japan), the BI platforms market grew at 16 percent in 2005
to reach $491.8 million in 2006, with Japan accounting for more than half the
overall market.

According to Bhavish Sood, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, “Enterprise
agility is a high-priority goal for enterprises in 2007. But BI's overall impact
on business is poorly understood and BI is still considered as 'nice to have' in
India.”

The overall BI market in India is at a nascent stage, with a huge up-tapped
opportunity for vendors to capture. CIOs are increasingly required to invest in
technologies that drive business transformation and strategic change.

India riding a wave

Since India is currently on the implementation wave of business applications
platforms like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship
management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM), the demand for BI platforms
will continue to rise. In fact, Indian enterprises show a strong preference for
products like database management systems or application servers with BI
capabilities embedded into the application.

BI priorities in India vary both by the vertical and size of the enterprise.
Selection of BI platforms is a key activity carried out by enterprises as part
of their BI initiatives with a granular focus on the technical platform
capabilities. Standardization, regulatory compliance and new laws like the Right
to Information Act are also driving the growth of BI in India.

The biggies

The top four vendors accounted for a majority of the Indian BI platforms
market contributing to more than 72 percent of the overall revenues. SAP grew at
an impressive 70.3 percent, replacing Microsoft as the largest BI vendor in
India, and relegating Business Objects to the third position. Despite the
growing economy and the apparent need for BI, the Indian BI market is less than
four percent of the total APAC (including Japan) market.

Building BI infrastructure is only one part of the overall problem. Getting
employees and executives to use that infrastructure is a cumbersome exercise and
often leads to under utilization of the BI infrastructure and slower growth
opportunities.

Therefore, while the market poses a huge opportunity, the lack of a
definition or agreement of what and how to measure/analyze the business will
continue to inhibit successful deployments, discouraging organizations from
further investing in BI.

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