The Indian BI market may be crowded but that isn’t stopping Arcplan from entering the fray. By Prashant L Rao
The Indian market for BI solutions is a crowded one and players range from heavyweights like SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft to specialists like SAS and many others. The market for BI software in India is expected to touch $81.5 million in 2012, a 15.6% rise over 2011 as per Gartner.
In this scenario, you would be forgiven for thinking that there wasn’t place for another player. You would be wrong, however. As it happens, arcplan, a player that has success stories in the region in Korea and China to boast of, is intent on making its presence felt in the country.
A company that’s been around for close to two decades, arcplan specializes in filing those BI niches that other solutions largely ignore. For instance, in a scenario where a company has rolled out multiple BI solutions, getting all of the information on to a single screen can be troublesome. arcplan offers a solution called Engage that does this among other things. Engage is a collaborative platform, think of it as a social network for the enterprise. Similar solutions have been offered by the likes of Salesforce.com with its Chatter, though that’s a pure enterprise social networking solution. Engage adds the ability to integrate information from sources both within and without an organization.
Worldwide, the company has focused on SAP customers and organizations that have already got to the stage where they are working with OLAP cubes created by solutions like Cognos TM1, Sybase or BOBJ Universe. In terms of industry verticals, arcplan’s focus is on manufacturing, BFSI, retail/services, chemicals & pharmaceuticals.
arcplan is in the process of setting up shop in India and it intends to work through a combination of global (E&Y, Deloitte) and local partners (Sonata, Alletec and Infoway Technologies). The company is already working with E&Y in India on a couple of deals.
In terms of the technology areas that it intends to address, Raghunathan Rangarajan, VP, Business Development, India, arcplan India, commented, “We will be addressing mobility, social media & collaboration, the CFO’s office, Big Data and the Cloud in the next 12-24 months.”
In mobility, like the other players, arcplan has a framework that ensures that an app developed in-house can be delivered using HTML5 to any modern mobile platform. On the social media & collaboration front, it has the aforementioned Engage. On the Cloud front, the company is working with specialist ISVs such as one that deals in Hotel Management Software which is going to use arcplan’s software to power a hosted/SaaS solution for the hospitality vertical.
For the CFO’s office, it has a planning, budgeting and forecasting tool called Edge that can be deployed in a couple of months. Edge takes historical data and crunches it so that the CFO’s office can make plans based on that. It’s also helpful in situations where organizations have to deal with offices in several countries (multi-currency). arcplan also has Excel Analytics for taking the work done in pivot tables and folding it back into the parent BI system.
Having received an order from FICCI, arcplan is bullish about its prospects. For now, it is focusing on signing up a few marquee deals so that it can then have referencable customers in India and take things to the next level. It’s a crowded BI market but this company appears to have a clear game plan and it has been around globally since 1991. By slipping through the cracks and helping companies get the most from their BI investments, arcplan is poised to repeat its success abroad in India as well.
