Business Intelligence: Insights and Roadmaps Date:   Wednesday , May 04, 2011 Businesses need quality insights driven by accurate data, now more than ever. According to Gartner, because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. SiliconIndia organized the Business Intelligence Conference on April 16th, in Mumbai, where the challenges, solutions and future of BI were discussed at length by over 10 experts from the BI industry. The conference kick started with the talk on ‘Emerging Trends and Technologies in the Business Intelligence Market’ delivered by Suresh Ramanan, AVP & Global Head – DW/BI&PM (Lifesciences) from Cognizant who spoke about the present need for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence to become ‘the single source of the WHOLE truth’ and address the increasing demand for timely and high speed information access and also shed light on the predicted growth of the BI market in the areas of mobility, big data, unstructured data integration etc. in bringing in natural responses to these demands. Taking the event ahead was Nimish Somaiya, Senior Managing Consultant from IBM India who said that solution centricity is an important factor in any solution but its significance is heightened manifold in BI/DW implementations due to the sheer number of interfaces, layers and tiers involved , in the session called ‘Solution Centricity, The Pivot for Successful BI / DW Implementations’. A session on ‘Interactive Business Analytics for Large Data Volumes’ by Vivek Bhatnagar, Country Director & Global Alliances from Ingres Corporation stressed on the need for specialized database technologies which not only provide fast analysis for large data volumes but are also less complex and comes at an affordable cost. It also enables interactive analysis of large data volumes on a single commodity server. This technology in addition to the columnar storage architecture for minimizing I/O and maximizing compression, now leverages the performance features of the commodity modern micro-processors such as their SIMD capabilities for “vectorised/super scalar” processing which is much more efficient with minimal overheads. Speaking on ‘Innovations in BI’, Harsh Bhogle, Senior Solutions Architect from SAP, stressed on Building Trust in BI data, Package solutions and Best Practices, Integration with other solutions, user experience and solution scalability. Along with the innovations like Text Analysis, In Memory analytics happening in the above areas, the session also briefed about how things like Metadata, Search, Web-Services can be used in Innovative ways, to ensure a quick and successful BI implementation. Where Harsh gave a macro view of the innovations in BI, we had Naveen Prabhu, IT Solutions Manager, Tiara Consulting Services who stressed on the innovations in Data Integration and how it is the foundation for Business Intelligence. Yogesh Bhatt, Principal Technology Architect, Infosys spoke about Social Media and CRM Analytics wave – and that every organization focused towards customer eccentricity and value, just can’t ignore the new channel “Social Media” and proactive listening is the best way to start investing if not already done so. He also added that marrying structured and un-structured data -the stages of social media returns start with active listening, followed by analysis along with the transaction information gathered via CRM/ERP and other customer focused applications. Make sure you are able to address your customer concerns with regards to your products and services, before your competition does. Speaking on ‘BI challenges for the SMEs’, Arshad Khan , Country Manager, Quick Report Software said “There are two main challenges for SMEs: How to adapt their analyses and reporting requirements without wasting financial technical resources? And how not to overload IT department with end-users reporting requirements? Therefore the solution is to empower end users, so they can be free from technical and IT dependencies by adapting BI tools to most widely used softwares like MS Excel”. A very impressed Satish Ramanan, Head – EBIA from Siemens expressed his privilege to speak at an event of this magnitude conducted by SiliconIndia and also said that it is doing a great job by hosting such events and it would be a great learning and development experience for professionals in various fields in the IT and non-IT industry including the speakers. The conference attracted assorted audience from diverse business fields who were forced to put on their thinking caps and learn from BI experts from leading companies. Tiara Consulting Services, ElegantJ BI, DEFTeam and MyReport partnered in organizing this exciting conference.