Rajneesh De, Consulting Editor, APAC News Network
The big data analytics market in India, just like globally, is marching at a fast pace.  Enterprises today value information as a critical business asset. Big Data analytics has therefore emerged as an essential competency for enterprises today.  Enterprises in India are today continuously striving to respond in constantly shifting business situations. This has led to creation of a modern enterprise data ecosystem so that data is up-to-date and the enterprise is ready to make informed decisions.
Adapting to major ongoing trends in analytics will enable enterprises to better react and pre-act. Data and analytics have become the key ingredients for this breakthrough. The direct corollary to this has been the growth of the analytics and BI market in India. These enterprises are currently employing big data and analytics as an advantageous practice to gain a competitive edge over their industry competitors by putting the data to the right use.Â
In India, CIOs, CDOs, and data and analytics leaders are increasingly focusing on business outcomes, exploring algorithmic business, and most importantly building trust with the business and external partners. In particular, they are experimenting and adopting smart data discovery, augmented analytics, in-memory computing and data virtualization to stay ahead of the curve.
Dissecting the Indian BI Market Numbers
The proof of the pudding though is in the eating only and so it is important to know how this has translated into revenues for the analytics and BI players in India. The Indian BI Software market is projected to reach $329.90m in 2023 and is expected to show a CAGR (2023-2028) of 11.66%, resulting in a market volume of $572.50m by 2028.The average spend per employee in analytics and BI is therefore projected at $0.63 in 2023.
Translated into Indian currency, the analytics and BI market in India is expected to reach Rs 1,12,0042 crore by 2027, up from Rs 3,35,688 crore in 2021, expanding at a CAGR of ~21.60% during the 2022 – 2027 period. IBM with 20% market share leads the BI analytics market, though the top 5 only accounts for 40% of the overall market. After IBM, these include Tableau (7%), AWS (6%), Splunk (5%) and Infor (3%). What that also means that the Indian analytics BI market is cluttered with several players, both big and small, with smaller market shares. SAP Analytics, SAS, Salesforce Einstein, Qlik, Teradata are some of the other key players in the Indian market.
Contrast this with the global BI market that was valued at Rs 1,77,826 crore in 2021. It is expected to reach Rs 2,92,394 crore by 2027, expanding at a CAGR of ~8.70% during the 2022 – 2027 period. The US, China, UK, Germany and Japan remain the top 5 BI markets globally, though India has now made its entry into the Top 10.
Looking into the Indian BI sector deeply, BFSI continues to be the largest sector being served by analytics in India. Overall, 38% in revenues for the analytics industry in India comes from BFSI. Marketing and advertising comes second at 24%, followed by the e-commerce sector generating 15% of analytics revenues in India. In recent years, sectors like travel & hospitality (61%) and pharma and healthcare (50%) contributed some of the biggest jumps in analytics revenues.
Geography wise, 28% of the market revenue for the analytics industry comes from Delhi NCR region. This is closely followed by Bengaluru at 27%. The highest increase in year-on-year analytics revenues for an Indian city came from Bengaluru only at $ 739 millio. Mumbai ($483mn), Hyderabad ($236mn), Pune ($219mn), Chennai ($189mn) and Kolkata ($88mn) are the following cities with highest contribution to analytics.
The average work experience of analytics and BI professionals in India is currently 7.9 years. Around 26,000 freshers were added to analytics workforce in India this year; up from 22,000 freshers last year. Fresher hiring has increased by 33%. Almost 40% analytics professionals in India have a work experience of less than five years, which is down from 42% last year. Analytics professionals with more than 10 years experience, however, increased by more than 28,000.
Analyzing the Indian BI and Big Data Trends
Today Indian enterprises can anticipate, adapt, and scale the value of their big data and analytics strategy by monitoring, experimenting with, or investing in key analytics technology trends, depending on their urgency as well as alignment with business priorities. There are a few trends that today define the India data analytics market.
- Understanding and Targeting Business Customers
Understanding the customer preferences is perhaps the biggest and most publicized areas where BI and analytics finds its use in India today. Enterprises are employing Big Data to gain a better understanding of their customers and their behaviors. With enterprises now having heterogeneous data sources, including traditional data sets mixed with social media data, browser logs, text analytics, and sensor data, Big Data is enabling them to paint a complete picture of their customers. The ultimate objective is to design a predictive model, a critical requirement in a developing market like India. To understand and target their customers accurately, Indian enterprises are employing Big Data analytical tools to accurately predict customer churn along with tracking their purchase habits.Â
- Integrating Metadata-driven Data Fabric into Enterprise Applications
With the rising demand for Big Data analytics, enterprises are employing data fabric to listen, learn, and act on the metadata. Consequently, they are able to flag and suggest actions for both people as well as systems. Indian enterprises are integrating data fabric to improve trust in and employ data in their organizations to reduce different data management tasks such as design, deployment, and operations. By integrating fragmented data assets, these enterprises can reuse the data, reduce time to market, and at the same time create a monetizable data fabric that fulfills the purpose.Â
- Evaluating Business Processes and Operations OptimallyÂ
Big Data is being increasingly employed by Indian enterprises to evaluate as well as optimize their business operations. Processes like supply chain optimization and HR are today increasingly using analytics. GPS and RFID sensors are being employed by enterprises to track delivery vehicles and optimize their routes by integrating live traffic data. Enterprises are also optimizing their talent acquisition, measuring company culture indices, and staff engagement by employing Big Data tools. Big Data analytics, coupled with IoT, holds incredible potential to enhance every business sector in the future.
- Adopting Cloud-based Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS)
Adoption of cloud-based data analytics-as-a-service and real-time analysis are among the top BI trends currently driving the evolution of analytics in India. Cloud-based Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) enables enterprises to quickly adopt the augmented intelligence and machine learning capabilities required to react quickly in a given situation and prepare accordingly. AaaS provides these enterprises with end-to-end data analytics, from data collection to cleaning, organizing, and processing huge and disparate datasets through the internet and tailored to fit business specifications.Â
- Smarter Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Explainable IntelligenceÂ
Business analytics is already a largely AI and ML-based process even in Indian enterprises, reducing the need for human intervention with ‘explainable intelligence’. By citing attributes, accuracy, statistics, and other sufficient and relevant collaterals, this technology will explain the need and relevance of a particular business decision.Â
- Making BI accessible through Augmented AnalyticsÂ
Augmented analytics solution helps business users better understand their business context, ask relevant questions and uncover insights more quickly. The use of enabling technologies such as AI/ML to assist with data preparation, insight generation, and insight explanation to augment how user explore and analyse data in analytics and BI platforms in called as augmented analytics. Today for Indian enterprises, augmented analytics help them perform more thorough analysis and data preparation tasks, even if they lack deep analytical expertise.Â
- Leveraging Advanced Data Governance and SecurityÂ
In the BI ecosystem, Indian enterprises are today focusing more on security. CISOs are developing proactive mechanisms to detect system anomalies before any issues arise. Data governance is also advancing to ensure the quality of business assets through role-based access, authentication protocols and auditing. When data is accurate, unique and up-to-date, the enterprise business users trust the insights as reliable means for boosting revenue and reputation.
Understanding Vendor Offerings
IBM Watson Analytics and Cognos BI are the leading analytics and BI platforms in the Indian market with 20% market share and is being used by different verticals like BFSI, retail, manufacturing and healthcare. IBM Cognos Analytics integrates cognitive computing technology, including AI and machine learning, originally developed for Watson Analytics. It is an all-in-one platform, providing Indian enterprises analytics functions ranging from creating dashboards and data integration to reporting, exploration, and data modeling.
Tableau offers interactive data visualization products based on BI. The Tableau solution offers enterprise users color, animation and cartography expertise to make data visualizations as easy as possible. Tableau connects a wide range of data sources, ranging from established sources like Excel to more recent additions like Amazon Aurora, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse and MapR Hadoop Hive Connectivity for Mac.
Salesforce Einstein is an AI technology that had been developed for the Salesforce customer success platform. Einstein encapsulates all the ML capabilities in Salesforce product portfolio with automation and smarter insights. The product involves predictive analysis for forecasting data to help users find and explain insights from data and using automated analytics to find the most crucial insights.
SAP Analytics Cloud is an all-in-one cloud platform for BI, planning and predictive analysis. It provides end-to-end BI platforms with dashboards along with ML built into key insights and integrated planning features. SAP Analytics provides real-time analytics and collaboration tools in the cloud. It can be used on-premise or cloud data sources for past or live data from SAP or any other external sources.
SAS provides a graphical point and good user interface for non-technical enterprise users and more advanced options through the SAS language. Being in the era of automation, SAS has an analytical platform called Viya which can be updated and integrated with AI. Viya is a huge platform of capabilities for all expertise levels, from Visual Analytics for reports and dashboards to event stream processing and complex model management
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