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Chitra Phadnis

BANGALORE, Oct. 6

BUSINESS intelligence and data warehousing, (BI and DW), traditionally the preserve of top consulting companies such as HP-Compaq, IBM, Accenture and KPMG, has become a focus area for Wipro Technologies.

Companies in India had not been an obvious choice when it comes to BI and DW, said Mr Vivek Bhasin, General Manager, Business Intelligence and Data warehousing, Wipro Technologies. The Asia-Pacific region is not particularly known for BI skills, which are typically available in the US, Europe and Japan.

However, with BI "moving into mainstream" (demand was limited to the Fortune 200 but has now spread to the Fortune 2000), the larger Indian companies at least have been looking at it. "At Wipro, we started investing in it four years back," Mr Bhasin said, though there was competition from other Indian companies.

Today, the company has 375 consultants in the area and of the 50 clients, a "significant" number are those who have gone in for the end-to-end (consultancy to implementation) offer.

The markets for BI are mainly in the US, Europe and Japan and Indian companies have to compete against the likes of IBM and HP in the area.

The report from Cutter Consortium (which offers high level advisory report, and information services) praised Wipro's "technical expertise and implementation experience", but also pointed out that the company lacked "visibility" and needed to brand its services globally.

As of now, Wipro is banking on its existing customers also opting for BI services, though Mr Bhasin was quick to add that the practice had won new customers on its own. BI customers include those in utilities, financial services and retail business, all areas that Wipro Technologies already has a presence in.

Cutter also observed that Wipro had shown "thought leadership" in leveraging the onsite-offshore model to deliver DW and BI services. Wipro is trying to make up for the lack of brand value through alliances with well known DW and BI players (SAP, CA/Prism, Oracle, MS, IBM, SGI, Cognos, SAP), participation in DW Institute-sponsored events and presenting white papers.

BI is add-on to various systems such as the ERP, CRM, SCM. Most large companies now have information, but they still need BI to use the information fully and cost effectively. BI then enables users to get information out of the database, do ad hoc querying and analysis instead of getting regular hard reports.

Companies are also discovering that analytics using BI can have a high impact on revenues, Wipro said.

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