Targeting the Growing BI Market Date:   Wednesday , October 06, 2010 Interview with Boby Mohan, Jt. Executive Officer &Head - Biz Dev, Distil Information Systems) How big is the Business Intelligence market for you? According to Gartner, the BI is estimated to be a $14 billion market globally of which the Asia and India are expected to be $1 billion and $100 million respectively. Of this, Distil Info seeks to address the decision support needs for companies in the < $250 million segment globally with our Distil DSS vertical suites, which forms close to 60 percent of the present market size. What are the emerging trends you see in this space? We feel that commoditization and pre-packaging is a main driver for falling deal sizes as companies (especially the Tier II ones) come out of the complex, ‘value added’ proposition of the BI solution in favour of much simpler and more effective decision support systems. Collaborative decision support systems, which leverage the organization’s capabilities across levels is the need of the hour today. A scenario tailor made for our pre-built content rich DSS offerings. What are the challenges you see in the market? The decision making community in the industry is still split on what the actual needs of the enterprise are from a DSS perspective. Companies look to buy decision support systems and end up evaluating for reporting systems today. DSS software has to be designed to address the conflicting demands from both sides. The challenge is in impressing IT teams with the solution’s ruggedness, scale and usability while reassuring business about the ability to evolve with minimal IT intervention. Budgets are being redefined southwards and expectations are breaking through the ceiling. How do you plan to position yourself against competition? All the products that come out of our labs are easy to implement and use, while being technologically superior. We guarantee that information finds its way to the right person at the right time to help him do the right thing. We are inspired by the positioning adopted by Volkswagen for the Original Beetle (Small & Reliable) and Google’s approach to simplicity when delivering complex technology. Give an insight into the competition you face in this market Competition ranges from small time players who ride on the hype and buzz to the large organizations with their all or none vertical stacks. The market is quite muddy with bevy of claims viz. Corporate Performance Management, Balanced Scorecard, Analytics, Real-time analytics and many more such, backed by poor results post implementation. What we bring to this scenario is a refreshing freshness inspired by plainspeak and our ability to deliver on promises. What are your future plans? Distil DSS for Healthcare providers, a product that is designed with the needs of the US and APAC markets is slated for launch in mid-2011. We have already launched our platform based services for Decision Support as a SaaS based offering for mid-Tier IT services/consulting firms looking to start up Analytics based KPO businesses. Our sales thrust moves westward from today’s presence in India and West Asia towards Europe and the U.S. in the next two years. To achieve economies of scale and stay ahead of the curve, we are actively looking at companies with synergistic offerings, which could be acquired to strengthen the bouquet of offerings from Distil Information Systems.