Oracle eyes huge growth from ‘democratization of BI’

INFORMATION WEEK [21/01/13]

By Srikanth RP, InformationWeek

As competition intensifies, business analytics has become extremely important for organizations to gain insights from the massive amount of information being generated. With the need for faster decision making, organizations can no longer afford to restrict access to BI or analytics tools within the top management.

Accordingly, many organizations are increasingly providing access of their BI tools to a broader audience, by making it easier for employees to access information via user friendly interfaces. “We see a big trend of democratization of BI. While earlier, usage of BI tools was restricted to the top management, today, we see usage percolating down to users,” says Vikash Mehrotra, Director EPM/BI, Oracle India

A case in point is Indian Overseas Bank, which has deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to improve risk management and costing models to better allocate resources and minimize operational costs across branches. The Bank has enabled close to 2,000 staff, including general, regional, and branch managers, to make better decisions about where to place operational resources by analyzing and monitoring information—such as the status of customers accounts, changes to credit limits, loan repayment schedules, and income leakage—from core banking and treasury systems.

Mehrotra also gives the example of the automotive sector, where dealers and salesmen today have access to BI tools, to enable them to make faster decisions. The suppliers to the automotive sector too have visibility of spares part movement from the OEM to the various dealers. Similarly, in the FMCG sector, it is common to see the distributed sales force armed with BI tools on their handsets or smartphones.

The opportunity for Oracle and other BI vendors is significant. For example, a Nasscom and CRISIL report, states that the Indian analytics industry is expected to grow from the current level of USD 200 million and touch USD 1 billion by 2015.

Oracle believes that this democratization of BI, where BI usage will grow beyond the number of power users and involve thousands of people, will eventually transform the way BI tools are seen today.