There is a lot of action happening in the BI and analytics scenario today. How do you see this space changing or evolving?
What we are seeing is that business users’ needs are changing. About five years ago, it was okay to provide business users with a monthly report with some statistics. If they need something else, they create an Excel sheet and get away with it. Today, they are expecting to go to their businesses with their own devices and have the ability to access corporate information through those devices. There isn’t enough IT stuff to produce report after report and push them to these users. Companies need to empower business users to do it themselves.
With the emergence of social media and mobile devices, a lot of data is getting generated on the consumer front. How does it affect the development of BI and analytics solutions?
It’s rare for somebody today to make a decision just on their own. For instance, someone buying life insurance would go over the Internet, get some answers and then talk to someone with the domain expertise. What we are finding is that our customers are asking for a user environment where they have access to all the information, navigate through that to get answers to questions and share these answers online so they can collaborate with others to form a consensus.
With our software, we can allow one user to do some analytics and share that dashboard with another colleague with the click of a button. In old days, the security team would build policies that would prevent people from having enough information to make decisions. Worse still, people would find other ways to access information and share it, which further increases the risk to data.
Did you foresee something like this happening and start off with a road map which would eventually lead you to the present stage?
I wish we could say that. But when we started 20 years ago, we developed a solution that was ‘in-memory’ and that wasn’t fashionable then. It wasn’t popular then because memory was expensive and CPU processing was expensive. That caused us to become very clever about how we use CPU and memory.
Today, CPU and memory continue to get cheaper. You can today load terabytes of data in memory and share it with thousands of users with a relatively cost-effective infrastructure.
With the traditional solutions, we heavily relied on databases and disk power which is slow. Today we see others taking the in-memory approach. However, with QlikView, you do not have to buy an extra database, while HANA requires you to buy a specific piece of hardware and is designed to run on their [SAP’s] ERP systems. HANA is an engineering solution to a bad design problem.
Which features of BI solutions do you think work well in the Indian market?
A lot of users find it difficult to use a BI solution. The key strength of such solutions is ease of use; in-memory processing is as relevant in India as in any other part of the world. The cost-effectiveness of the solution, however, is very critical in the country. Through PoCs, we have been able to demonstrate that they can deploy our solutions within weeks, with a relatively small investment and scale it out. Our top few verticals here are BFSI, automotive, FMCG, consumer electronics and IT/ITeS.
A common question we face from enterprise customers is, “I have BusinessObjects or SAS. Why should I go in for another tool?” We explain to them that what we do is very different from what these tools do and we add value and protect their current investments.
What we see across the globe is companies that start with SAP for months, don’t get anywhere and then start looking elsewhere for answers. If you take the Indian scenario, the largest user base that SAP or IBM Cognos have in an organization would not be more than 150 or so. We have got customers where there are thousands of users. Even if a traditional software like Cognos is given to, say, 2000 users, they cannot use it effectively as it is complex to use and needs the help of an IT expert.