Frost & Sullivan, a global consulting company, on Thursday ranked Microsoft as number one vendor of business intelligence software. According to the findings of its latest report on the Indian business intelligence market, F&S said Microsoft has cornered 18 per cent of the $33 million market.
At an event held in Mumbai, Sailesh Dave, director (global best practices), Frost & Sullivan also presented Microsoft with a market leadership award, in on-line analytical processing Applications. The award was received by Tarun Malik, senior marketing manager (enterprise marketing), Microsoft India.
Business intelligence is an umbrella term for a set of tools and applications that allow corporate decision makers to gather, organise, distribute and act on critical business information. Business intelligence comprises applications and technologies used for accumulating, amassing, analysing, and providing access to data to facilitate better, quick, and efficient decision making.
In India, the market for BI tools is still in the development stage. Companies that have implemented applications such as ERP, SCM, or data warehouses, often face a situation where they have a huge amount of data and information but no helping tool or clearly defined map, which can be put to use for making strategic decisions.
"The business intelligence market in 2004 was $33 million. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 29 per cent over the next four years to reach $70 million in 2007. The maximum contribution to the market comes from data warehouse at 36 per cent, followed by OLAP and reporting tools at 34 per cent, ETL at 18 per cent and analytics at 12 per cent," added Alok Shende, director (information communication & technology practice), Frost & Sullivan, India.
IT/Telecom along with manufacturing verticals is expected to fuel demand for BI solutions in future. The pharmaceutical vertical is the most mature vertical for BI adoption in India and hence the contribution from this vertical is expected to decrease.
Commenting on Microsoft's value proposition in the business intelligence space Malik said, "Microsoft offers its customers the most comprehensive BI platform on the market, with integrated analytics, data mining, data warehousing and reporting functionality that integrate seamlessly into your overall application infrastructure to deliver real competitive advantage.
The Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award is given to the company that has exhibited market share leadership through the implementation of market engineering strategy.
