Business insight beyond business intelligence

BANGALORE, INDIA: Information represents a major part of a business today. Large amount of data is produced as part of a company's operation and stored in various forms for future use. It lies strewn everywhere, both in structured a well as in unstructured formats.

Nagaraj Bhargava, COO, Synaptris, says: “But, how to understand and manage this data that is growing in leaps and bounds with every passing minute? Moreover, mere managing the information is no more viable, especially in the current scenario. Today, one has to crunch this whole lot of data cost effectively and at the same time bring out the meaning from them.” He was talking to Deepa Damodaran of CIOL in an exclusive interview. Excerpts:

CIOL: Can you brief upon what the company is into?

Nagaraj Bhargava: Synaptris is part of the Cybernet Slash Support (CSS) Group and a software application vendor in information management sphere. It specializes in reporting solutions and helps businesses generate 'actionable information' from silos of data.

Synaptris has over 90 channel partners across the Americas, Europe, MEA and Asia Pacific with solutions deployed in over 2,300 customer locations across 60 countries.

Synaptris was recently named the winner of 2009 IBM Lotus CTO innovation award. We help companies manage data and provide insight. We deliver value in terms of analytic and reporting without being business intelligence company. While business intelligence products provide a 20 per cent deeper analysis of given data than a reporting software does, they are 75 per cent more expensive.

Business intelligence is restricted to power users such as functional managers, research analysts, whereas it doesn't cater to the other business and enterprise users such as customers, partners, vendors and others in the lower management levels.

Synaptris has two main solutions IntelliView and IntelliPRINT.

IntelliPrint is a contextual information management solution for Lotus Notes and Domino applications. The product range includes IntelliPRINT Reporting, IntelliPRINT Dashboard Reporting and  IntelliPRINT Analytics.

IntelliView is a user-driven business insight for any application. The product range include  IntelliVIEW Designer, IntelliVIEW Report Analyzer, IntelliVIEW SDK, IntelliVIEW Reporter and IntelliVIEW Dashboard Reporter.

CIOL: What are the evolving trends in the information management market today?

NB: In the current scenario, when the market is going through a phase of slowdown, business enablers are under pressure and need a tool to empower users to make rapid and informed business decisions while enabling IT to minimize overhead and maximize RoI.

Today the cost of information technology has to go down. CIOs are looking at means where they can manage information at the lowest cost of production. They want to make the best possible use of the expensive software that they are investing in. Today the requirement is the capability of delivering value next morning and at the same time cater to the bulk of information need.

Personalization of business insight will be the next frontier in information management space. Going forward we see a huge demand coming from the structured sphere in terms of data management, quicker business insights and personalization of business insight. Both Synaptris IntelliView and IntelliPrint are well positioned to take the advantage of this evolving paradigm.

CIOL: What are your India plans for 2009?

NB: Companies are today very keen and also cost-sensitive about analytics tools they use to crunch information, and that’s the market we will capture now. We see a good demand for our solutions, especially IntelliPRINT, which posted 60 per cent quarter-on-quarter growth in Q1 2009.

Indian information management market is very sophisticated and we are more than ever concentrating in this market from a large enterprise perspective. Currently, India contributes a mere 10 per cent to Synaptris' total revenue share. The company is designing an aggressive 'Go To Market' strategy along with its India partner HCL and aims at a five per cent growth in terms of revenue share by the end of the fiscal year.

Synaptris largely caters to the government, banking, manufacturing sectors and has plans to further  strengthen and venture more into these spaces. The company is also in look out for more partnerships and is in talks with over twenty companies.

We will launch a couple of new solutions and an upgradation of IntelliView in the next quarter. The new solutions will cater to both unstructured and structured information management and will be cross industry and segment. Some key verticals which we believe will adopt it and at an accelerated pace will include banking, manufacturing, retail, telecoms and government.