Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Integral to Decision Making: Virtusa

Information management is vital in decision making. To maximize the value of information, decision makers within enterprises need the capability to extract the right insight at the right time from large volumes of data, draw reliable conclusions, and take necessary action for business success. Here comes the importance of data warehousing and business intelligence (DW/BI) tools.

 

Technology Marketing Corporation recently caught up with Amit Agarwal, associate director and practice head, data warehousing and business intelligence of Virtusa, to share his thoughts on DW/BI. Our exchange follows.

 

 

Amit Agarwal: Virtusa is a global information technology services company providing IT consulting, technology and outsourcing services. We specialize in creating high performance processes by simplifying our clients’ IT environments, thereby enabling them to improve their customers’ experience, expand market reach, improve time to market, and lower costs.

 

We have a dedicated data warehousing and business intelligence practice that offers end-to-end services encompassing a broad array of tools and technologies. Our solution offerings address the needs of customers across diverse industry verticals, including telecommunications, banking, financial services, healthcare, travel, logistics and information technology. Our services are tailored to the needs of specific vertical business functions including customer relationship management, credit data warehouse, credit card processing analytics, claims management, HIPPA 5010, Enterprise performance management analytics, healthcare performance measurement and product lifecycle management among others. 

 

Our offerings span the entire DW/BI lifecycle, which include DW architecture consulting, data integration, business intelligence, master data management and data warehouse testing. Our expertise in DW/BI encompasses traditional DW/BI services, product Engineering and hosted solutions which enables us to offer flexible and comprehensive end-to-end DW/BI services.

 

 

AA: The DW/BI industry has evolved over the years and has witnessed technology advancement and industry consolidation. Some of the key drivers of the market are:

1.    Need for real time intelligence for effective and faster decision making. To achieve this, enterprises will be required to integrate BI with their operational process.

2.    Demand for cost effective, rapidly deployable BI implementations are forcing vendors for disruptive implementation model such as BI as a service.  

3.    Industry process centric BI solutions to address the solution gaps in the existing enterprise implementations are fast gaining recognition and demand. 

4.    Vendor consolidation has led customers to analyze the possibility of application portfolio rationalization to optimize existing infrastructure and maximize business value. We have observed increasing enquiries relating to upgrade and migration services to meet such objectives. 

5.    Enterprise need for optimizing, automating and devolving decision-making capabilities. Predictive analytics is expected to be a big enabler for automated decision making. 

6.    Constant pressure to improve shareholder value and corporate earnings has driven organizations to identify granular departmental silos to improve operational efficiency and unlock potential value. Last but not the least, the perennial quest for single version of truth still continues to be one of the major business drivers for DW-BI solutions and services.

 

 

AA: Our Services are targeted to users across business functions and organizational hierarchy. For example, for the CEOs, solutions such as executive dashboards provide a consolidated view of organizational performance EPM analytics, planning and forecasting, compliance reporting help them to gain better business insights, ensure forecasting and planning accuracy and improve profitability in the long run. On the other hand, chief information officers would like to reduce infrastructure costs and improve SLAs.

 

To meet the varied needs, Virtusa offers product specific services like migration, performance tuning, data warehouse testing and around-the-clock support. Further, we offer BI solutions to support concept to market, lead to cash and trouble to resolve needs of businesses.

  

 

AA: As per Gartner’s (News - Alert) forecast, the data integration tools and business intelligence solutions are expected to register strong growth and reach $9 billion in 2013 from the current $6 billion market. Master Data Management software revenue is expected to be about $3 billion in 2012 with an average annual growth of 22 percent.

 

With a rich heritage in data quality product engineering and data integration, Virtusa is well equipped to address the unique DW/BI needs of customers across industries. We have identified channel capabilities in DW/BI horizontals, which have been incubated as practices. We also plan to develop convergent DW/BI – BPM packaged solution offerings, which will provide expedited and value-added services.

 

In addition to horizontal solutions, we have extensive exposure and experience in servicing the technology needs of different verticals including banking, financial services, insurance, healthcare, and telecommunication space. Some of our recent implementations include:

1.        Implemented a enterprise-wide strategic product lifecycle management solution for a global telecommunication service provider which enabled migration of product data from more than 600,000 customer premise equipment to a single strategic catalog.

2.        For a major Financial Services client, we architected and built a Business Intelligence Center, which is integrated to their CRM application. The solution analytical and decision support capabilities, channel integration, sales and service automation. To meet the current market demand for better services at lower costs, we have developed solution accelerators, customizable point solutions and frameworks to increase productivity and decrease total cost of DW/BI implementations and significantly improve time-to-market for our customers.

 

 

AA: There are many players in the DW/BI services market. We are competing against midsized IT service vendors and system integrators.

 

With a rich heritage in providing technology solutions and services to global clients, we differentiate ourselves from our competition by focusing on business outcomes. Through our unique platform approach, we have assisted global companies consolidate, modernize and rationalize their core business processes. This has resulted in measurable customer benefits including improved end customer experiences, lowered costs, improved time-to-market, increased revenue and increased market share. Some of our key differentiators in DW-BI space: 

 TMC: What’s next?

 

AA: While Virtusa offers a broad range of services in the DW/BI space, we are also focusing on building convergent BI centric solutions spanning BPM and ECM horizontals. Our experience in implementing DW/BI solutions to clients in various verticals enables us to bring together and apply best practices.  We will continue to develop and build our capabilities around BI as we see immense potential in the space.