Indian mobile business intelligence surge bucks global trend

India is set to experience a surge in mobile business intelligence (BI) adoption despite slow global take-up.

The latest BARC BI global survey showed that 16% of companies use mobile business intelligence, compared with 8% two years ago and 13% last year. The uptake has been slower than expected, according to Carsten Bange, CEO of BARC.

Indian business intelligence software revenue is expected to reach US$150m in 2015, according to Gartner.

“We see signs of the emerging importance of BI in India as senior executives are increasingly exploring the different styles of analytics to resolve their business imperatives,” said Ian Bertram, managing vice-president at Gartner.

Analyst company Research and Markets said the business intelligence (BI) and analytics market in India was valued at around 10bn INR in 2012, and is expected to grow 22% a year between 2012 and 2017.

India’s extensive use of mobile devices and the accelerating use of smartphones and tablets among Indian SMEs could see it buck this trend. According to Gartner, the overall mobile device market in India is showing strong growth. For example, the nascent tablet market in India is projected to grow 160% in 2014 and break through the 200m INR mark this year. The much larger 3.8bn INR market for other mobile devices will grow 24% in 2014.

Online marketplace IndiaMART.com is an example. Last year it launched its mobile application and site for its 15 lakhs suppliers and one crore buyers with the aim of empowering them with mobilised version of its BI platform. “The response has been great from the SME community, which has resulted in over 25% traffic contribution from the mobile platform,” said Agarwal.

“There has been a major increase in the use of smartphones, which is primarily the reason for change in the way mobile business intelligence (MBI) technology is being used to increase business value,” said Dinesh Agarwal, CEO at IndiaMART.com.

For the growing Indian SMEs, “the adoption of MBI is a smart choice as it supports real-time sales, revenue and customer data in dashboards which easily fit in a smartphone screen”, said Agarwal.

“Indian businesses are making heavy use of mobile phones to assist them for business growth. The convergence of the internet and the mobile has completely revolutionised the Indian business scenario.”

Realizing the many benefits of MBI, like IndiaMART, many other Indian businesses either have or are planning to develop an internal mobile system for its employees to provide business data on the go and take decisions faster.

The growing acceptance of mobile devices in the operational workflow in the health, retail, banking and financial services sectors, and public and government organizations, is fueling the Indian mobile BI and analytics market.

Mobile BI has the potential to change the way Indian enterprises function and take decisions on a daily basis.

“Though mobile BI adoption has not yet much taken off in India, we expect to see greater adoption of mobilized BI models among Indian enterprises,” he said.

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