'Optimize analysis, have the BI edge'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Enterprises, irrespective of size, talk big data, analytics and business intelligence these days. What was just Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) a few years ago stands finetuned into something more focused, based on the changing dynamics of the industry.

So, information highway and data explosion are the latest trends that need to be managed efficiently by organizations. Since most organizations today have acquired an ERP suite or the other, and with that, the data asset, they are now looking at deriving most intelligence out of it.

This is where Business Intelligence (BI) assumes greater significance. A domain that has caught the eye of not just small-time homegrown System Integrators (SI), but huge multinational BI vendors as well. As a result, some niche solutions like optimization or prescriptive analysis have emerged as an offshoot of the burgeoning BI solutions catering to different organizations.

In this context, Altair, a U.S.-based company that empowers client innovation and decision-making through technologies that optimize analysis and management of business and engineering information, is driving forward such solutions.

In an exclusive conversation with CIOL, Miles Mahoney, president of HiQube, BI software division of Altair, tells us what exactly their solutions could do to give an analytical edge to businesses.

"Since '90s, companies have invested in traditional BI systems, such as ERP and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) ones. The issue with that is it would take years of SI and data warehousing adopting traditional models," explains Mahoney.

He adds that their solution, HiQube, is a high-performance data engine, which slices and dices data efficiently and boasts of algorithms, simulators and analytics. "We were able to embed analytics and libraries to our prescriptive analytics solutions. We have embedded mathematical operations for advanced analytics of big data and the speed at which data is manipulated is high here. Also, we can run optimization in simulation for critical business issues."

As for what differentiates them from other BI players, Mahoney claims that others are still bent on traditional systems, while they are an advanced solutions provider. "We complement the traditional BI vendors by extending value propositions. Combining in-memory performance with traditional BI scalability HiQube gives its users the best of both worlds. We also offer price optimization."

It counts among its clients in India state-owned research organizations, such as the DRDO Labs and ISRO, apart from NIT Education and ITC Limited. "We want to have a partner-centric approach to build our solutions into their framework."

On a happy note, Mahoney informs that the adoption trend in India is at an all-time high. He concludes, "Companies are talking about predictive trends for product future and financial future. Most of them are also replacing their traditional BI models that extract data from their PCM and other systems. The response is very encouraging. Our next step is to invest in technologies involving associated services of our core business discipline to bring about behavioral and cultural change."