Our strategy revolves around delivering value to organizations

Sudipta K. Sen has played a key role in establishing SAS India as a leader in the “Enterprise Intelligence Platform” market. Headquartered in Mumbai with regional offices in Bangalore, New Delhi and Pune, SAS India, under Sen’s leadership, continues to expand the breadth and depth of software solutions offerings across verticals to meet the varying needs of its customers and prospects. 

Frost & Sullivan, in its latest report on Business Intelligence Industry in India, has credited SAS for its distinct leadership position in India across end-to-end business intelligence platform from Data Extraction, Transformation & Loading (ETL), Data warehousing to Online Analytical Processing & Reporting, and Analytical Intelligence.  

With a mission to deliver superior software and services that empowers people with the power to make the right decisions to improve profitability, Sudipta Sen - Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director, in an interview to AC Ganesh of CIOL, talks in depth about the role of Business Intelligence, SAS’s strategy and the company’s partnership with Hexaware Technologies.

Can you brief on the role of Business Intelligence (BI) in an organization today and its strategic value?

Business Intelligence (BI) gives you the ability to gain insight into your business or organization by understanding your company's information assets. These assets can include customer data, supply chain information, personnel data, manufacturing, and sales and marketing activity as well as any other source of information critical to your operation. Business intelligence solution allows you to integrate these disparate data sources into a single coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis by anyone in your extended enterprise customers, partners, employees, managers, and executives. 

Thus, Business Intelligence helps organization by providing them required intelligence, which is critical for the growth of an organization. SAS provides end-to-end enterprise intelligence that empowers our customers to answer even the most complex business questions, resulting in reduced costs, new opportunities and greater profitability. While some call the information derived on the basis of hindsight and insight as BI; for SAS, apart from these two, the ability to forecast/ predict (foresight) constitutes BI. With constantly changing market demands, increasing regulatory requirements, fiercer competition, sluggish economies and the need to do more with less, SAS helps businesses to take informed decisions, faster.

Can you draw comparisons to the market response in India vis-a-vis US and other Asian markets for BI solutions?

According to Frost & Sullivan, the Indian BI market is pegged at $47.4 million with a revenue potential of $68.8 million by 2007. It is coming out of its infancy stage & the next 3 years’ forecast predicts that the market would be in high growth trajectory. In fact the market grew by 43% in 2006-6 from 2004-5.

The Indian Industry in particular is going through a phase of tremendous growth, and enterprises are growing either organically or are expanding their customer base through mergers & acquisitions. In a scenario of mergers / acquisitions, companies not only face the challenge of managing a larger customer base, but also of integrating disparate IT systems & technologies to derive a unified view of the business across the enterprise. SAS plays a critical role in such a scenario by integrating data across enterprises and deriving intelligence to create a 'single view of the customer.

Does BI fundamentally work better for intangible products and services companies as against tangible products companies?

As a matter of fact, BI works for both tangible and intangible products and services. Rather, the knowledge derived from BI helps businesses derive tangible and measurable benefits in the form of reduced costs, increased profitability, customer growth etc. 

You have said that BI solutions will help organizations move beyond traditional BI reporting to a true BI platform approach. Can you elaborate more on that?

Business Intelligence technologies and solutions have become imperative for the effective and efficient functioning of any organization as it provides timely & accurate information that decision makers across enterprise need, to make strategic business decisions.

The operational systems across organizations have matured over the years. The only key differentiator now would be as to how quickly these organizations can derive intelligence from their data residing across multiple points in their enterprise and reduce ‘time to intelligence’ and therefore ‘time to market’.

SAS’s new generation of Business and Analytics software and solutions will help create true enterprise intelligence. With SAS. 9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform, enterprises will be able to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers. This will enable better, more accurate and informed decision-making, to drive organizations forward. Being the only vendor that provides an Enterprise Intelligence Platform by completely integrating leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data, SAS will help enterprises move “Beyond BI”. Traditionally all businesses have vast amounts of data parked across multiple sources. Individually this data may provide you with query and reporting, but not business intelligence to help you make those strategic decisions. True Business Intelligence lies in getting data across multiple sources, thereby creating a single-view of the customers, ultimately helping you make informed decisions.SAS India's market strategy

Do you have any specific market strategy, which you are concentrating upon to help you generate revenues?

Business Intelligence software and solutions have gained immense importance across Industries, as it addresses real life business challenges. SAS over period of 3 decades of existence have developed solutions for addressing various vertical segments some of them include:

- Banking & Financial Services

- Government

- Insurance

- Life Sciences

- Manufacturing

- Retail & Distribution

- Telecommunication

- Travel & Transport

- Utilities

- Media & Entertainment

- Mid markets

- Academics

- IT/ITeS

Our strategy revolves around delivering value to organizations which is critical to their success. From go to market perspective we have formed strategic alliances with major IT companies who partner with us in delivering value to our customers. Some of the organizations with whom we work closely include TCS, Wipro, Hexaware, Satyam, PWC, HCL, Cognizant.

What is your pricing model and can you give the projected annual growth

rate and anticipated revenue?

Pricing would depend on nature of solution, complexity, Scope of customer engagement.

Entering SMB segment requires a lot of support. Have you formulated a

specific model to reach out to them?

Customer irrespective of Size need and deserve right support. Our team at SAS India ensures that our customer receives the support on time, every time.

How do see your alliance with Hexaware to benefit you in the Indian market specifically?

SAS India's partnership with Hexaware Technologies builds on the complementary strengths of the two companies by combining SAS's powerful BI and analytics software with Hexaware's proven technical and industry best practices to deliver industry specific solutions. These solutions will help organizations move beyond traditional BI reporting to a true BI platform approach - bringing together massive amounts of data, integrating and cleansing this data, asking business questions through advanced and predictive analytics, and sharing the resulting intelligence throughout the organization.

It helps our customers leverage our strong domain competence and delivery capabilities with the comprehensiveness and strength of the SAS solutions and platform.

© Ciol Bureau