What can Cloud Analytics do for Indian businesses

Cloud analytics is a boon for all those organizations that may lack the capabilities to invest and maintain analytics infrastructure and software on premise. It’s demand is thus quickly catching up worldwide. What’s happening in the Indian market. We try to dig out more in a conversation with Deepak Ghodke, Country Manager – India, Tableau Software, a business intelligence and analytics software company

Deepak Ghodke, Country Manager-India Tableau Software

• How is the cloud analytics market in India shaping up? 

Many Indian businesses today are re-evaluating their infrastructure so they can move faster and be more flexible. Adoption of cloud services, from Salesforce, Workday, Google Analytics, has been massive. The cloud analytics market is still nascent in India; however I do think that the overall adoption of disruptive technologies in India is improving rapidly. Indian companies want to have the same access to technologies that global companies adopt to stay competitive. With regards to cloud as a technology, Indian companies are now realizing the potential of cloud. Analytics and big data are already quite popular with Indian enterprises, and many of them are able to effectively use their data to gain business advantage. Bringing the power of business analytics to the cloud is sure to be a success in the Indian market.

• What is the key value proposition for using analytics on cloud? How do you see Indian enterprises approaching this?

Cloud analytics offers a host of advantages to enterprises, however if I had to choose one key value proposition, I’d say it is the swiftness with which cloud analytics can be deployed within an enterprise. IDC has reported that speed to deploy was cited by 76% of cloud users—more than any other factor, including cost. But we see Indian enterprises taking advantage of the flexibility of the cloud, security, ease of sharing with users both inside and outside their organizations.

• What are the major opportunity areas for companies like Tableau Software?

We have a cloud analytics product called Tableau Online which is a enterprise, cloud BI solution that makes rapid-fire business analytics easy. Customers use Tableau Online for quick, easy and flexible analytics in the cloud, including large and small businesses, non-profit groups, institutions of learning, and many other organizations around the world.

We do think that Tableau Online has opportunity in the Indian market, and with the upcoming Tableau Online 9.0 version, the upgrade brings faster performance, additional live database support, Single Sign-on support, and a slew of new features designed to help people achieve more with their data in the cloud.

• Can you talk about some successful implementation cases in the Indian enterprise context?

Cloud implementations in India are similar to the implementations we see the world over. We have customers using Tableau Online to share dashboards within teams and organizations, and even using the cloud to share data with their clients and partners. That’s another tremendous benefit of analytics in the cloud – the ability to quickly and seamlessly share information across organizations.

• In cloud-based analytics, what should be the key considerations for the CIO/IT community?

In a super-competitive market scenario across industries, the implementation of the right technology is going to be the key differentiator for enterprises. The fastest, most accurate and most agile enterprise is bound to win. Cloud analytics can help enterprises create this much needed edge over others in its class.

CIOs are looking for IT solutions that their business users can embrace with ease. Self-servicing IT is becoming more relevant, as the decision makers with the organization want to access and play with the available data themselves to mould it into insights that they can use.

Going ahead, what will be key focus areas for Tableau Software in India? What will be the biggest challenges to resolve?

India represents a huge opportunity for us. There is a tremendous thirst here for organizations to see and understand their data. Estimates from analyst firms on the global market opportunity for business intelligence and analytics are topping well over $13 billion at this point—and growing. India, with the size of our economy and business growth, is obviously a huge part of that. The challenge for us is meeting this huge demand in India. We’ve build strong partnerships here to help, such as our partnership with Infosys which we announced last year.