India is the fastest growing BI platforms market in APAC -Gartner

Bangalore

November 2nd, 2007

Gartner Inc, said that India is the fastest growing Business Intelligence
(BI) Platforms market in Asia (including Japan), posting a growth of 35.6
percent in 2005-06. BI Platforms revenues in India grew from $ 12.1 million in
2005 to reach $ 16.4 million in 2006, with all leading vendors posting
double-digit growth.

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. Many enterprises still rely on gut feelings and past
experiences while making decisions and are not comfortable with the
democratization of information and the transparency that BI initiatives bring
about."

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

"BI can deliver on this promise if deployed successfully because it can
improve decision making and operational efficiency, which in turn drives the top
line and the bottom line. Also, information generated from enterprise
applications is at an all-time high and will continue to increase. BI platforms
can turn that information into an asset on which better business decisions can
be made," Sood added.

Since India is currently in the implementation wave of business applications
platforms like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship
management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM), the demand for business
intelligence 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.

Vendors also see embedded products as the ideal platform for catering to the
burgeoning small and medium sized organizations. Several vendors in 2006 have
been modifying or extending their product, pricing and partner strategies to
reach this key group. Hosted BI through software as a service is one new
approach that is being pioneered by a cluster of vendors.

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. While dashboards and score cards are the common requirements for a
range of industries, the telecom and banking verticals are moving towards
implementing sophisticated analytics for understanding customer churn and making
credit risk assessments.

Standardization, regulatory compliance and new laws like the Right to
Information Act are also driving the growth of BI in India.

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 3rd position.

Despite the growing economy, and the apparent need for BI, the Indian BI
market is less than 4 percent of the total APAC (including Japan) market.

Sood explains, "Qualitative benefits, such as better insights and better
decisions can be difficult to measure and place in a return-on-investment model.
This makes further expansion of investments harder to justify in numerical
terms, posing problems for both business users as well as the CIO approaching
the CFO and/or management.

Secondly, 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.