CEO SPEAK

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CEO SPEAK

We have done over 120 BI implementations in 3 years

Avadaiappan Rajendran, CEO, business solutions, Team Computers, unveils major milestones achieved in the BI space in India and in the US
How has the business intelligence market done so far? Going forward, what are the expectations from this technology? Team Computers is a company, which has steadily built up its business with special focus on BI with over 120 BI implementations in a three-years time line; contributing to about 15% of the consolidated topline of the company. The bottomline share is even higher. The key specialization, for the company has been over large deployments catering primarily to the enterprise segment across verticals. We are continuing to do more things for existing customers including: L&T Finance, Reliance Capital (Life, General and Consumer Finance), Birla Sun Life, SBI Life, Reliance General Insurance, IFFCO Tokio, Crompton Greaves, and several others. Our signifi cant success in 2010 has been with Videocon Telecom, doing a record delivery of phase I implementation in less than 4 months, providing dashboards, analytics and reports for all the business functions. 2010 also marks our concentrated entry into the US market, with success in over 10 customers with key wins like Bloomberg, Symantec and Cisco. We have successfully implemented enterprisewide reporting solution for a large 100-yearsold insurance company. How would you describe your partnership with QlikView and Google for Business Intelligence solutions? Typically, customers have 2 types of data such as structured data, which includes databases and applications and unstructured files such as servers and emails. For searching, you need both. Hence, at Team Computers, for structured information, we tied up with QlikView and for unstructured data we partnered Google. Currently, we have 40,000 large customers using Google apps across 60 countries. For QlikView, we are the elite solutions providers. We have identified market segment and have come up with solutions for it around QlikView. Today, we have 8 insurance companies as our customers in India and 2 customers in the US. Besides QlikView, we have our in-house TEAM solutions which help us to see most critical business information like never before.
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TEAMs solutions are based on QlikView, a leading business discovery technology. Together, TEAM and QlikView provide business users, visibility into the critical business information that makes performance improvement possible. Teams extensive industry experience and certifi ed implementation practices accelerate deployment, giving business users the benefi ts of investments, much faster than traditional BI implementations. What has been the overall adoption rate of BI in India vis-a-vis other countries? Which are the verticals going for this solution? BI investments in developed countries have been on traditional DWH and OLAP technologies. They are going through a re-injection of newer technologies like QlikView. We have seen that large companies have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they have yielded disproportionately low returns. However, in developing countries, companies who have completed ERP implementation and are mature, now their need for BI is raising. A variety of new BI tools are available now, to make lesser investments and get results quicker. What are the key challenges in terms of selling and deploying BI solution? Challenge is identifying the core requirement and the need for the customer. Next is to fi nd a solution that will add value for the customer. If a partner has good domain knowledge and understands the customers business process well, the BI project is bound to be successful. The project management and resources deployed, like the BI consultant, should have sound knowledge of IT, warehousing, query, etc. On the product part, the reports are easily confi gurable and the run-time is customizable as per user requirements. Most BI systems today are expensive and diffi cult to implement. What are the best practices that Team Computers adopts while dealing with BI? We have come up with a standard approach which is a combination of technology and

business consultancy. Our practice is CMM Level 3 certified. Hence, defining customer pain points and identifying pressing needs is our starting point. For business needs, we defi ne the measures and metrics required to solve the business problems enlisted. These metrics get created as dashboards/scorecards. Then the users are trained and the use of these dashboards is integrated into their existing processes, to make sure the business benefi ts are derived by using the metrics created. A good fi rst step is to form cross-functional teams for BI projects. When left entirely to IT, the success of projects is often measured by cost and speed of implementation. What sectors could be the major adopters of BI? We see a lot of BI adoption happening in insurance, retail, telecommunications, securities, banks and manufacturing companies. On a horizontal front, we have proven cases on a SAP or Tally user base. Our software complements SAP, ERP or management application that extracts data, builds report and analyzes the data providing crucial business information. When it comes to the adoption of BI, how mature is the enterprise market? Also, how has the adoption rate in the mid-size market been? The growth of BI across and specifi cally in the Indian market refl ects a demand from customers who, after spending years creating systems to record data and transactions, want to get more mileage out of that information. Businesses want information that is more timely and useful, particularly if it can feed directly into growth and profi tability. BI has emerged as a core tool guiding decisions and strategies for areas as diverse as marketing, credit, R&D, customer care and inventory management. SMB segment has started understanding the need of data mining and analytical has started catching up. We see QlikView to be the right solution at an affordable price for SMB
SANDHYA MALHOTRA (sandhyam@cybermedia.co.in)

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July 1-15, 2011

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