Microsoft to double its BI market share

Pragati Simlote

NEW DELHI: Microsoft is aiming to double its Business Intelligence (BI) market share in India in the next 18 months from the current 18 percent.

According to global analyst Frost & Sullivan, the Indian BI market in 2004 was $33 million and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 29 percent over the next four years to reach $70 million in 2007.

Microsoft offers its customers a BI platform with integrated analytics, data mining, data warehousing and reporting functionality that integrate seamlessly into their overall application infrastructure.

The company is launching SQL Server 2005 this fiscal, which is expected to further enhance its BI offerings. The server has inbuilt advanced analytics capacity of ETL, data warehousing, analytics and reporting.

Microsoft App Server & Enterprise senior marketing manager Tarun Malik said, “BI is a key driver for the application server market in India. We are pretty bullish on the Indian BI market and expect a growth rate of 30-50 percent, much higher that the 30 percent growth rate predicted by F&S.”

He added, “Financial, telecom and FMCG are the early adopters of this technology and increasingly mid market customers of traditional manufacturing industries are also adopting these solutions. To take advantage of this opportunity, we are expanding our partner base and appointing around 20-25 new partners — around five-six partners in each region.”

The company is also targeting the SMBs and the medium businesses and is looking at companies where IT is not a critical factor but the IT integration in the company is very high.