Well, the answer to this lies in Business Intelligence (BI), a solution that empowers users with capabilities like monitoring, analytics, and planning. It can be used for planning and executing new ideas and ventures effectively.

Explains, Sanjay Deshmukh, country manager (India and SAARC) of Business Objects --a provider of BI solutions, "BI helps to collect information, analyze data, and generate reports to the decision-makers. It helps businesses identify ways to maximize profit with integrated cost and profitability analytics."

From the user perspective the performance of the product ranks high. BI have hit the ground running in terms of taking decisions on various new projects based on past , present, and future predictions.

According to Pradeep Sen, executive director of Datamatics, a leading global IT solution and services company, also user of BI, opines, "BI has powerful performance management application that provides you with the infrastructure to link people at all levels of your organization -- from executives to individual contributors-to your overall corporate strategy."

How does BI Functions

BI software gathers and analyzes large amount of unstructured data like production metrics, sales statistics, attendance reports, and customer attrition figures. These data helps in planning, budgeting, and setting up business goals.
Substantiates Deshmukh, "BI solution has facility to monitor and analyze performance, gives quick access to high-value scorecards, dashboards, and customization options for higher business value. Other benefits are its scalability, performance and self-sufficiency."

Cost Factor

Is BI an expensive and complex product for emerging business -- specially when high cost is a constraint?

Well, SMBs often view BI as an enterprise luxury. The cost, which is considered high in proportion of their IT budgets, is often the stumbling block while considering BI technology.

Although, large enterprises were the early adopters of BI solutions, yet the situation has changed now. Due to the quick tangible returns that BI provides, SMBs are also opening to BI technology. Besides, software vendors are training their guns at SMBs with products specially designed catering to their requirements.

Echoing similar thoughts, Sen, said, "Over the last 2 years, BI suppliers, such as Business Objects, Microsoft, and Oracle have moved into the SMB market in a big way -- offering lower-cost packages that are simpler and easier to use."

Business Benefits

Information is bedrock of sound planning and decision makers can wield BI to get accurate, current, and relevant information to harness business power with instant response time on massive data volumes. It also helps in clearing any doubts by giving answers to qustions like -- "what and if". In addition, SMB heads can leverage factual information provided by BI to meet customer's expectations.

BI minimizes training requirements by adopting a familiar working environment. It detects hidden problems by highlighting information by projecting it in image form that you are unable to view otherwise. It can drill into reports and fetch information, which can form basis for great business decisions. Also BI quickly recognize about your competitive advantages.

Elucidating on this, Sen said, "Executives at emerging businesses want BI software for analysis and reporting capabilities, so that they can better comply with government regulations and make better business decisions. BI solutions are often more than just sophisticated database or reporting technologies."

Implementation Issues

BI can be meld with the existing network with out hassle. Certain BI tools can be embedded within existing processes at the operational and tactical levels without much alteration.

Markets

Indian markets, specially the emerging businesses, are in nascent stage of adopting BI. Sectors like BFSI and Telecom are investing heavily on BI. Manufacturing and ITES sectors are also in the spree of adopting BI solutions. It's expected that government and retails will further fuel the BI market growth. The market is expected to grow at 40%.

According to Deshmukh, mid-market companies have smaller budgets and fewer technical resources compared to the enterprise segment. However, BI providers have addressed this challenge with innovative pricing. They have licensed the product as per concurrent access license policy because typically in SMBs the user base is not more than 50-100 users with a concurrency of not more than 20%. Hence by making minimum investment, they're able to provide BI to more users.

Major IT companies, such as HP, Microsoft, IBM, and Business Objects are offering BI solutions to big corporate and SMBs.

Substantiates, Sen, "Business Objects has created the crystal decisions division -- enhancing both its midrange products and channel program. The crystal decisions line is simpler to use; integrates the BI features SMBs are likely to need -- such as reporting, dashboards, query, and analysis; and is up to 70% less expensive than the company's enterprise-level products."

"Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition integrates BI and data warehousing system that's packaged, preconfigured, and priced to meet the needs of SMBs," Sen added.