The idea is to mine the existing data for insights into the business. For instance, the system can see patterns that help companies decide their next step in marketing.

In India, the adopters of BI have so far been telcos and the BNFIS segment known for their technology savvy, the MNCs whose parents have implemented it abroad. The selling strategy is to pinpoint the pain in each business and work around it.

For instance, for telcos it was the pain of having their customers lured away by competition. A BI solution could throw up names of customers who were “likely” to move, based on pattern recognition of usage styles. The solution also helps decide whether that customer is profitable enough and worth the company’s time and effort to retain her or whether it makes better business sense to just let go. “Even if there is an improvement in churn by 1 percent, it means a lot for the telcos,” says Gokarn.

Most of the pain that BI addresses is “latent pain”, according to him. SAS prides itself on domain knowledge that allows it to help customers identify those pain areas and come up with a solution for it.

SAS’s best story in India is about how Standard Chartered Bank’s credit card division managed to launched a new product based entirely on SAS’s business intelligence solution.

Around two years back, the bank came out with a card targeted at a segment of its existing customers — professional women — who had proved to be loyal customers and were profitable to the bank — all identified by the BI system. SCB sent out cards to these women. Further insight should prove how successful the launch has been, said Mr Gokarn.

According to Frost and Sullivan, the BI market in India for 2003 was 17 m $ and it is increasing year on year by over 30 percent.

BI covers a range of areas starting from the simples querying and reporting tools to ad hoc queries and what if analysis; to descriptive modelling (understand the market what has happened in the past) to predictive functions (predicting the future) and finally optimisation ( what the company would like to to happen).

Various players are present in parts of the chain. SAS itself is attacking the market from both the high and low end with solutions, Mr Gokarn said.

IT services market, and pharma contract research and even drug discovery which deal with large amounts of data that BI is used widely in.

The CBDT and the Central excise department are among the organisations that are potential partners. While government are not so hung up on cost cutting, any talk of revenue maximisation and collection is easy enough to catch their attention. Besides the departments have set themselves [revenue] targets to achieve and want to meet the, said Gokarn.

Yet another customer is the designer outlet Ravissant, who needs to know every bit about the customer, including buying patterns and likely forecast of when and what kind of products a particular customer would look for at a particular time.

Pattern recognition is also behind the now famous beer and diaper story from Walmart. The retail outlet found out that a large number of fathers who came in on weekends to buy diapers for their babies also bought a few bottles of beer. Therefore it made sense to place the two together and prod the buying of beer.