“We have done over 120 BI implementations in 3 years”

How
has
the business intelligence market done so far? Going forward, what
are the expectations from this technology?

Team
Computers is a company, which has steadily built up its business with
special focus on BI with over 120 BI implementations in a three-years
time line; contributing to about 15% of the consolidated topline of
the company. The bottomline share is even higher. The key
specialization, for the company has been over large deployments
catering primarily to the enterprise segment across verticals. We are
continuing to do more things for existing customers including: L&T
Finance, Reliance Capital (Life, General and Consumer Finance), Birla
Sun Life, SBI Life, Reliance General Insurance, IFFCO Tokio, Crompton
Greaves, and several others. Our signifi cant success in 2010 has
been with Videocon Telecom, doing a record delivery of phase I
implementation in less than 4 months, providing dashboards, analytics
and reports for all the business functions. 2010 also marks our
concentrated entry into the US market, with success in over 10
customers with key wins like Bloomberg, Symantec and Cisco. We have
successfully implemented enterprisewide reporting solution for a
large 100-years old insurance company.

How
would
you describe your partnership with QlikView and Google for
Business Intelligence solutions?

Typically,
customers
have 2 types of data such as structured data, which
includes databases and applications and unstructured files such as
servers and emails. For searching, you need both. Hence, at Team
Computers, for structured information, we tied up with QlikView and
for unstructured data we partnered Google. Currently, we have 40,000
large customers using Google apps across 60 countries. For QlikView,
we are the elite solutions providers. We have identified market
segment and have come up with solutions for it around QlikView.
Today, we have 8 insurance companies as our customers in India and 2
customers in the US. Besides QlikView, we have our in-house TEAM
solutions which help us to see most critical business information
like never before. TEAM's solutions are based on QlikView, a
leading business discovery technology. Together, TEAM and QlikView
provide business users, visibility into the critical business
information that makes performance improvement possible. Team's
extensive industry experience and certifi ed implementation practices
accelerate deployment, giving business users the benefits of
investments, much faster than traditional BI implementations.

What
has
been the overall adoption rate of BI in India vis-a-vis other
countries? Which are the verticals going for this solution?

BI
investments in developed countries have been on traditional DWH and
OLAP technologies. They are going through a re-injection of newer
technologies like QlikView. We have seen that large companies have
invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they have yielded
disproportionately low returns. However, in developing countries,
companies who have completed ERP implementation and are mature, now
their need for BI is raising. A variety of new BI tools are available
now, to make lesser investments and get results quicker.

What
are
the key challenges in terms of selling and deploying BI solution?

Challenge
is
identifying the core requirement and the need for the customer.
Next is to fi nd a solution that will add value for the customer. If
a partner has good domain knowledge and understands the customer's
business process well, the BI project is bound to be successful. The
project management and resources deployed, like the BI consultant,
should have sound knowledge of IT, warehousing, query, etc. On the
product part, the reports are easily configurable and the run-time is
customizable as per user requirements.

Most
BI
systems today are expensive and difficult to implement. What are
the best practices that Team Computers adopts while dealing with BI?

We
have come up with a standard approach which is a combination of
technology and business consultancy. Our practice is CMM Level 3
certified. Hence, defining customer pain points and identifying
pressing needs is our starting point. For business needs, we define
the measures and metrics required to solve the business problems
enlisted. These metrics get created as dashboards/scorecards. Then
the users are trained and the use of these dashboards is integrated
into their existing processes, to make sure the business benefi ts
are derived by using the metrics created. A good fi rst step is to
form cross-functional teams for BI projects. When left entirely to
IT, the success of projects is often measured by cost and speed of
implementation.

What
sectors
could be the major adopters of BI?

We
see a lot of BI adoption happening in insurance, retail,
telecommunications, securi ties, banks and manufacturing companies.
On a horizontal front, we have proven cases on a SAP or Tally user
base. Our software complements SAP, ERP or management application
that extracts data, builds report and analyzes the data providing
crucial business information.

When
it
comes to the adoption of BI, how mature is the enterprise market?
Also, how has the adoption rate in the mid-size market been?

The
growth of BI across and specifically in the Indian market refl ects a
demand from customers who, after spending years creating systems to
record data and transactions, want to get more mileage out of that
information. Businesses want information that is more timely and
useful, particularly if it can feed directly into growth and
profitability. BI has emerged as a core tool guiding decisions and
strategies for areas as diverse as marketing, credit, R&D,
customer care and inventory management. SMB segment has started
understanding the need of data mining and analytical has started
catching up. We see QlikView to be the right solution at an
affordable price for SMB.