BI for SMB and the role of channels

Vendors globally have an interesting range of offerings for BI for the SMB segment. One of the topmost names is Power BI for Office 365 offered by Microsoft.  With a subscription model offered by MS, it is expected to, as a MS spokes person put it during the launch conference- ‘democratize’  BI.

Says Shrikanth Karnakota,Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India, “The use of business intelligence (BI) in the cloud is causing a significant shift away from traditional thinking around analytics solutions.  Cloud-based BI brings analytics products within easy reach of small and medium businesses (SMBs). It is widely available, compared to traditional BI.  A cloud-based suite allows users easy access to data and provides for improved data management as well as data analysis tools.”

Power BI, Microsoft’s business intelligence product, is fast gaining popularity in the SMB segment.  Firstly, it lets users share and access Excel reports anywhere, no matter what device they work from.  Features like Power Query and Power Map capabilities help explore, combine, and analyze data, making it an ideal BI offering for more cost conscious, smaller enterprises. Its cloud-based platform and the easy to use Microsoft Excel sheet and is a bundled offering with Office 365.  The advantage it brings are many, but for SMBs, the biggest advantage is its cost effectiveness and ease of usage.

“Power BI is cloud-driven, so it is easy to access a world of data and do analyses in Excel, using familiar plugins like PowerPivot (for fast in-memory analysis across data sets) and Power View (for visual data analysis).  After creating new charts, graphs, dashboards, and performing visualizations and analyses, users can publish them on new BI Sites on Office 365,” Shrikanth explains.

Even with products like Power BI, small and medium enterprises will still need a resource with a deeper understanding of data sources, how to sort them, and thereafter how to ensure the best feature report based analysis.  Combining the right data sources and ensuring they can be utilised to extract the right information, is the job of a support partner. In this case, a channel partner to products like these.  This is a great opportunity of value addition for channel partners, to focus on identifying the right data sources, and how the pieces fit to form a recognizable whole, that should be the service provided.  Data integration and normalisation will actually be the support they can provide, along with the software solution.  This is where channel partners will need to focus their energies, in order to win the market better.

To ensure that channels can be better partners to the users, Microsoft has ensured that Power BI offers an efficient set of tools that help them better support their customers’ business processes, especially to understand their business requirements through data flow and reporting requirements.  It can, over time, be an active cannel to help channel, especially technology partners, to move up the value chain- from being the infrastructure or tech support team to becoming a business systems support, advising on strategy that can be pushed by these tools.

For other applications that provide BI support on the cloud as well, or SaaS for BI, channel partners still have a huge scope of service expansion. As Mohan Rajamani, Director, Cache Technologies, India says, “indeed, these customers would need a lot of hand holding in migrating their data to generate meaningful reports and there is a very good potential in structuring the end customers data is CSV or XML.  We can help them to build a dashboard as one time revenue generation activity besides the monthly subscription incentives.”

Therefore, safely, BI on the cloud is almost as big an opportunity for channel partners as it is for vendors. As Vineet Dahiya of InfoAxon says, “Yes, we see this as a big opportunity but we see it more from the perspective of vendors. That is because it is their platform running in a SaaS model which they will invite many people coming onto the board so for every per user they have a huge amount of business opportunity to tap.  I see as a not as significant but definitely as an opportunity for us …because vendors and users who want to get similar platforms developed, would probably come to solution providers like us to get those build.  Or maybe we would probably get closer to these vendors to integrate platforms that we have built on different technologies to integrate with their platforms.”

Adds Vikram Kole, COO, Maia Technologies, “… it as a big opportunity and we see that there is large investment in the technology and the GTM will define across the adoption.  Options for deploying solutions are only available in Indian market only when you provide end-to-end solutions.  Security can be an issue but you can offer private cloud on BI.”

Either ways, there are opportunities that the channels cannot overlook or afford to ignore.