Corporate India is going through a phase of tremendous growth, with enterprises growing either organically or expanding their customer base through mergers & acquisitions. As Indian organizations continue to compete both locally and with their global peers, they need to address business challenges on Managing Growth, Managing Profitability, Providing superior Customer Service and Adhering to Regulatory Compliance. Business Intelligence has a great potential to address all of the above challenges for enterprises and have today rightly become strategic imperative for the effective and efficient functioning of any organization.

As per IDC survey Indian BI market is expected to touch $80m by FY07 and would continue to grow at CAGR of 25% through 2010, which is a strong indication that Indian organizations are planning to deploy BI solutions for increasing their competitiveness. Though earlier adoption of BI was restricted only to large customers and in select vertical industry, today we are seeing emerging enterprises looking at BI solutions to effectively compete.

Expanding base
Today Indian organizations are moving towards deploying fully integrated enterprise intelligence platforms that can efficiently disseminate intelligence across the organizations. Just as an ERP platform is needed for the operational side of the business, an enterprise intelligence platform with all components fully integrated is and will continue to be needed for the intelligence side of the business.

Unlike past, when many companies kept business intelligence (BI) applications locked away inside IT departments or in the hands of business analysts. Today business intelligence solutions span the entire breadth of a company. From the supply side to the customer side and everything in between, BI now reaches every functional area within an organization. Likewise, decision-making now transcends all organizational levels. With interfaces that can be tailored for each user's needs, employees can become more efficient, and top executives can spend less time reacting to tactical issues and more time driving strategic goals.

Successful companies recognize that BI as more than technology, and this is where people, process and culture come in to play. Do you have people who are committed to fact-based decision-making? Do they have processes in place to make data readily available? Do you have a culture that's going to take on the change necessary to adopt a culture of fact -based decision-making? Most importantly does an organization not only accept change but does it also go out and look for a change and than embrace it?

Business intelligence is knowledge, and the value of that knowledge is in how quickly and accurately it can be applied to a business problem or an emerging opportunity. Moving forward we will see much broader adoption and acceleration of BI usage in Indian organizations for leveraging the information they have and generating intelligence for fueling innovation to compete on global basis. We will see increased use of Analytics not only historical, but predictive for further increasing their competitiveness. Companies who are able to harness data and commit to fact -based decision-making are the ones that are going to be quicker in market and ultimately have competitive advantage.

Author is CEO & Managing Director, SAS Institute (India) Pvt. Ltd.