Indian business intelligence, analytics software revenue to reach $139.5 mn in 2014

Indian business intelligence (BI) software revenue is forecast to reach $139 million in 2014, a 15 per cent increase over 2013 revenue of $121.2 million, according to a forecast by research and analysis firm Gartner. The forecast includes revenue for BI platforms, analytic applications and corporate performance management (CPM) software.

''For the fourth year in a row, analytics ranks as the priority in Gartner's chief information officer (CIO) survey. BI is used today to support hundreds of decisions on the strategic and tactical level,'' said Frank Buytendijk, research vice president at Gartner. ''Now analytics is also starting to support the hundreds of thousands of decisions on the operational level and is moving from internal support to a sellable asset. The results are impressive.''

''As enterprises start to make investments again after the elections, we expect business intelligence and analytics to be one of the key areas of investments to drive revenue growth and improve service efficiencies,'' said Bhavish Sood, research director at Gartner.

''We see signs of the emerging importance of BI in India as senior executives are increasingly exploring the different styles of analytics to resolve their business imperatives,'' said Sood. ''There is an increased emphasis on metrics management and the growing use of performance management. Software and service providers are increasing marketing spend on BI thus leading to higher visibility. In many industries, especially the regulated ones, such as telecom and financial services, clients are setting up dedicated competency centers focused on the use of information.''

Indian CIOs are gaining a better understanding that executive sponsorship and data quality are the two most important reasons that determine the success of BI implementation. However, a general lack of talent across all fields of information management in organisations will continue to be the critical barrier to their successful adoption of business analytics initiatives. The increasing interest in big data creates new challenges and confusion across these areas.

Indian enterprises adopting BI have the advantage of benefiting from earlier adopters in developed markets, rather than needing to build their approaches from the ground up. In order to increase adoption, enterprises should evaluate data discovery, geospatial and mobile-based approaches.