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"I firmly believe that we will continue to grow our BI business with Microsoft through our  partnership."

Suresh Mishra, CEO, Wizertech

Business Intelligence promises to be a space rich in possibilities. BI is expected to be a big support for trends such as the cloud, mobility, and social media. Combined with the forces of big data, BI will soon assume a pivotal role to track humongous amounts of data and its influx. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise, and the need to make decisions anywhere, anytime accessing real-time analytics make mobile BI remain a hot topic, leading most BI vendors to develop a mobile version. Cloud-based BI will boost the use of BI. Although there are concerns about implementing BI on the cloud (mainly security), the vendors and the market as a whole have matured.

As far as India markets go, Gartner reports stand testimony to the growth charter. Estimates state that the market for BI software in India is expected to reach revenue $81.5 million in 2012, a 15.6 percent increase over 2011. Also, worldwide BI software market revenue is slated to grow 8.7 percent to reach $12.7 billion in 2012.

If Channelworld’s MVP Survey 2012 is any indication of how partners see the market and perceive the vendors, then Microsoft is going to see bright days ahead. Market share and position notwithstanding, where Microsoft is quite not there, the vendor is forging ahead and retains partner confidence and its position vis-à-vis last year. MVP 2011 saw the five traditional vendors, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle and SAS fight it out; this year sees a surprise inclusion of CA in the top five, and SAS being ousted out of the group.

Microsoft has consistently scored well across all the six parameters laid out in the survey to emerge number one. CA scored well in technology, marketing assistance, and management styles to inch its way to be number five.  SAP and Oracle have scored 63 and 64 respectively, their scores being consistent across the board, to garner rankings four and three.

Partner perception about Microsoft as a potential leader in BI seems quite balanced.  Sanjay Sharma, MD and CEO, MM9 Technologies, comments, “Microsoft is a very astute vendor; they are keeping pace with changing times, and manage partners well.” Sharma further elaborated that MM9 was growing at an exponential pace and was planning to grow its Microsoft BI business by 100 percent. This includes a move to tap into the vendor’s cloud offerings. Says Sharma, “Microsoft is very good in the core parameters of technology, marketing assistance, and customer support. They are prompt in promoting their latest wares and cloud is the buzzword now. We get a lot more say in many matters since the time we have grown and our business is now a lot more non-transactional.”

Suresh Mishra, CEO of Kolkata’s Wizertech, says that while it is still early days to comment on Microsoft in the BI space, Wizertech believes that they will continue to grow their BI business with the vendor through their partnerships.