Not platforms, but Ready Solutions - BIRetail Redefines Business Intelligence in Retail Market Date:   Friday , September 03, 2010 Going by a Gartner’s prediction, by 2012, business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for Business Intelligence (BI) and 20 percent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service as a standard component of their BI portfolio. It is at this juncture of increased importance of BI, BIRetail hits the Indian Retail market, with an ambitious growth projection of owning 7-8 percent of India’s BI solutions in retail space in less than 36 months of its origin. Niraj Jaipuria, Co-Founder and Director at BIRetail, with over 20 years of experience in IT and business space, has made it a leading provider of BI solutions to the retail industry. With a strong family legacy of business ownership, he founded Source Code Infotech (SCI) in 1997 as a Software and IT Services company which later merged with Cyquent. The great spirit of entrepreneurship backed Niraj in founding BIRetail and with the help of his Co-founders Ash Kejriwal, who has more than 15 years of experience in the retail industry and Sagar Sawant, founder and CEO of Cyquent, he could make BIRetail a global leader of retail BI solutions. The current BI vendors in the market are mostly BI platforms, which require a solution to be implemented over a time-consuming implementation process. Further, these BI platforms mandate an upfront capital investment in terms of license fees. BIRetail is the only company in the world to provide Retail-ready Business Intelligence in a “monthly subscription” model, and has pioneered the development of commercial-grade software on the “cloud computing” platform. Business Intelligence solutions most of the times become very complex and technically sophisticated. “Through its intuitive and non-technical user experience, BIRetail strives to bridge the gap between the business user and the technology,” says Niraj, citing the episode of a CTO of a global retail company, who was highly impressed at the ability to navigate through BIRetail with no prior exposure/training to the solution. Extreme affordability, reduced implementation time and the retail domain focus of BIRetail gives the product the competitive edge over others in the Indian retail market. Although there are not many who provide ready BI solutions, BIRetail often finds itself pitched against established players like Cognos from IBM, Oracle’s BI solution and SAP’s BusinessObjects in the market. BIRetail Ltd originally is a British company incorporated in London, UK and BIRetail India is a 100 percent subsidiary of the BIRetail Ltd, UK. The company launched its BI product in the UK as the test market in late 2008. Due to the global economic downturn which hit retail space the worst, BIRetail couldn’t mark significant growth, but unlike many biggies in the industry, the company could survive and maintain its slow growth rhythm. Then, it looked at penetrating the Indian market which was still strong and retail in India has been booming despite recession. Talking about the challenges before BIRetail, Niraj says, “The biggest challenge is also the biggest opportunity in India. We have to reinvent our products based on the diverse market in India.” The company plans to enter the Middle East market by early 2011, and relaunching BIRetail in UK by mid 2011. BIRetail is seeking a strong local partner for the Middle East market, while deep marketing budgets is the biggest hurdle to be crossed in the UK/U.S. markets. As part of its organizational culture, BIRetail conducts a lot of team building activities to make sure that its members share a sense of belonging in the organization.