Gartner Inc, global IT research and advisory firm, 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.