Out Of Balance?

A small thought to ponder for the local community:

Trade between Australia and Brazil has increased by 58 per cent last year, making two-way commerce between the countries bigger than with France, Germany or Italy.

In our own Analytics field, why are we so fixated on news and views from the US? Shouldn't we be focussing more on what is happening in our strongest growing major partners like India, China and Brazil?

Here are a couple of pieces of interesting news coming out of these countries in the last few days:

India

• Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) launched a new business intelligence solution for hospitals and health care sector. The company today said in a press release that it has developed an out of the box dashboard that will simplify projects, cut cost and dramatically shorten time to value related services to both hospital administration and patients care.
• Ramco Systems will soon introduce a corebanking analytics solution aimed at addressing Business Intelligence (BI) needs of banks. The analytics solution packaged and delivered with HP s Neoview Appliance box will be based on Ramco s Decisionworks software framework. 

China

• Chinese telecom operators spent US$1.18 bln on their business and operation support systems in 2008, up 26.8 percent year-on-year and a significant portion of this was on business intelligence.
• China Mobile is working on a back end system based on cloud computing technology, which it has dubbed "Big Cloud". This includes data mining systems for China Mobile's mobile search service and a business intelligence system to track user behavior.

Perhaps we need to to redress the balance and start looking at innovative and cost-effective analytics solutions coming out of these countries? Are they potentially going to deliver greater functionality at significantly lower cost from the big 4 (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) vendors?

I would love to know if any of our local organisations are using analytic technology from these countries. Anyone know?

July 3, 2009:

Here's a footnote to my original blog entry. I just read a white paper from HP called the 'Top 10 trends in Business Intelligence for 2009' and I was pleased to read:

Trend #2: Post-Western tech economy
Western countries will not continue to be the sole
source of technology innovation. World-leading
businesses of the future are the ones who will make the
shift from western-centric business models to become
true globally adaptive organizations. They’ll seek the
best ideas from anywhere in the world and distribute
research and development (R&D) activity to include
emerging markets. Emerging regions will transition
from being simply suppliers of low-cost talent to 1)
developers of best practices and technology,
challenging multi-nationals to localize their value
chain, and 2) consumers who set global standards.
Western companies will be driven to using social
network-based collaboration tools to integrate the
creativity and work of a globally distributed workforce
and partner ecosystem.
Much innovation in BI, i.e. event processing, advanced
analytics, integration of unstructured data, automated
data classification, decision automation, etc., can
benefit and accelerate from technology research and
the modern and collaborative development techniques
used in countries like India. Need has outstripped
availability and the organizations who can leverage
this R&D efficiency will be well positioned in the
new economy.

A least one other person agrees with me!

Here's a copy of the full paper from the folks at HP Neoview:

Download Top 10 trends in Business Intelligence for 2009

Take a look online at  www.hp.com/go/bi