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SMB Investment in SaaS-Based Business Intelligence Increases in India: AMI Partners

By Rajani Baburajan
TMCnet Contributor

Investment in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert))-based Business Intelligence among small and medium businesses (SMB) will increase significantly in India in 2011, according to AMI Partners.

The requirement for accurate and real-time information is driving the growth in the SaaS-based Business Intelligence market. Indian SMBs have spent $23 million on SaaS-based BI solutions in the past twelve months.

Indian SMBs are moving into the next wave of sophisticated applications. Better performance management, profitability and overall spending management, along with efficiency and productivity management initiatives are some of the key drivers.

In India, BI is primarily used as a part of a CRM solution, as better customer relationship management is a must for higher customer satisfaction, acquisition and retention.

Given this backdrop, usage of 'BI-on-the-Cloud' (or SaaS-based BI) is projected to increase significantly among India SMBs.

"AMI anticipates expenditures on this type of application by India SMBs will skyrocket over 24 percent in the next twelve months. As mobile devices like tablets and smart phones show greater proliferation," said Swati Sasmal, vice president of Research at AMI-Partners, in a statement. "SMBs adopt BI-on-the-Cloud to take advantage of mobility-based business intelligence that enables anytime, anywhere decision-making."

The efforts of vendors to modify solutions to become more user-friendly are also fuelling the usage of business intelligence applications among India SMBs, according to AMI-Partners.

Besides verticals such as banking, financial services, insurance and manufacturing, BI is finding increasing adoption in sectors such as retail, logistics, hospitality and mid-sized to large hospitals.

The growing retail sector offers a significant latent opportunity for increased business intelligence adoption, in-store management, customer management and innovative customer-related data analysis leading to the creation of focused customer loyalty programs.

Recently, AMI-Partners announced that the opportunity for intelligence/business analytics (BI/A) software as part of an SaaS-bundled offer will increase by 25 percent through 2015, to $500 million.  Implementing BI/A business software has become an increasingly important priority for small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the U.S., according to the report called “U.S. SMB Cloud Playbook.”