Mumbai: The market for Business Intelligence (BI) platforms in India has grown by 35.6 per cent in 2005-06, making it the fastest growing geography for business intelligence in Asia.

In the period, SAP grew at 70.3 per cent to replace Microsoft as the largest BI vendor in India and relegated Business Objects to the third position, a research from Gartner Inc said.

According to Gartner, BI platforms provide the infrastructure and tools to enable users to build applications that facilitate decision making and help organisations learn, understand and improve their business.

Business Intelligence revenues in India grew to $16.4 million in 2006 from $12.1 million in 2005.

However, the Indian BI market is less than 4 per cent of the total Asia Pacific (including Japan) market. In APAC, the BI platforms market grew at 16 per cent in 2005 to reach $491.8 million in 2006, with Japan accounting for more than half of the overall market.

Rising demand

Since India is currently in the implementation wave of business applications platforms such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management, the demand for business intelligence platforms will continue to rise.

In fact, Indian enterprises show a strong preference for products like database management systems or application servers with BI capabilities embedded into the application, said Mr Bhavish Sood, Principal Analyst, Gartner.