Zensar appoints US executives for business intelligence

Looking to tap the fast growing business intelligence (BI) market Zensar Technologies on Thursday announced the formal launch for its BI/data warehousing (DW) practice with the recruitment of two senior professionals in the US to strengthen its existing enterprise application services portfolio.

The worldwide BI tools software market is expected to grow from $2.5 billion in 2004 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.4 per cent to $2.9 billion in 2009.

The BI platforms sub-segment is projected to grow from $979 million in 2004 to just under $1.5 billion in 2009 and the enterprise business intelligence systems sub-segment from $1.1 billion in 2004 to just under $1.5 billion in 2009.

Emphasising the potential in this area, Ganesh Natarajan, global CEO and deputy managing director of the company said, "We have launched this operation with 40 people in the US and 20 in India, with two senior executives in the US to head this practice."

The enterprise applications services strategic business unit in Zensar has already recorded its first projects in key markets of San Jose, Dallas and Chicago in the US.

The most significant of these orders is to implement an end"�to-end BI solution for a global leader in optical lenses, for redesigning the entire BI architecture of the client.

"We expect to have a 120-strong team by the year-end and are looking to garner revenues of $3-4 million with 6-8 customers by the end of the financial year," said Ganesh.

The BI team will be headed by Raja Uttam in the US and Manish Vijaywargiya in Hyderabad, with Dave Fenton in the US responsible for strategic integration.

The key drivers for this practice will be the increasing importance of information analysis capability to understand customer needs as well as organisational performance drivers, Ganesh said. "The simple outsourced model is obsolete. Zensar's BI/DW solutions respond to customers' need and choices by focusing on strategic transformation to bring about an integrated business value rather than tool based implementations."

Nitin Parab, Senior V-P & head (enterprise applications services), said, "Zensar will continue to work on cutting edge technology in the Oracle e-business suite for our global customers. This also allows the team to work on high-end engagements such as customer and inter-company consolidation, chart-of-accounts re-engineering and supply chain optimisation."

Nitin adds, "Our approach to BI is completely tool agnostic. Our goal is to help our customers bridge the gap between their businesses and IT."

Doug Hall, the Dallas-based business director of Zensar Inc, said, "The benefits of a holistic and careful integration plan are too powerful to ignore "� an integrated enterprise has the ability to deliver consolidated information to customers; additional ROI comes in the form of lower costs of integration. Over the last year we have seen tremendous growth in the core Oracle applications and BI/DW practices. We also see substantial business opportunities coming our way to provide full service consulting services in these areas and end-to-end integration will be the focus of our work in the days to come."