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Analytics: the key to understanding
13 September, 2005
Data analysis has grown up and matured into a sophisticated adult: Analytics.
The following article was written by Dr. James Hearne, published by International Developer magazine, issue 33, pages 48-49, November 2005.
Analytics is the key to understanding and managing complex systems in sophisticated organisations; it is the means whereby we make sense of overwhelming information. It helps us understand underlining relationships, see past patterns more clearly and make predictions with greater confidence.
It is this realisation which has prompted Hearne Scientific Software Pty Ltd to enter into an agreement with Cranes Software International in Bangalore in India, in order to bring sophisticated analytics services to the Australian and New Zealand markets. “After over twenty years in the data analysis business, and also as a distributor for Cranes owned statistical software products, we are now moving into the analytics market and have entered into a partnership with Cranes Software to greatly enhance our capacity to deliver high level consulting in this area,” said Dr James Hearne.
Over the years, Hearne has built up a reservoir of staff with computer science, engineering and mathematical skills and virtually all Hearne staff achieved first class honours at university. Working at Hearne has given them practical experience in providing technical support and training for a wide variety of technical programs. Offering these skills, which are in scarce supply in Australia and New Zealand, to the open market seemed a logical progression for the development of the Hearne business.
Recently, Hearne decided to partner with Cranes Software International Ltd., a multi national high tech company based in India. This partnership will certainly enhance and extend Hearne’s consulting capability and give Hearne an ever needed price advantage. James Hearne talked to a number of Indian companies and visited Bangalore in pursuit of a partnership, where he visited Cranes Software International. He discovered floors of highly qualified programmers and systems engineers and visited the Cranes Varsity, a private university belonging to Cranes, specialising in post graduate engineering and computing courses. Naturally, Cranes itself has the pick of the top performing postgraduate students.
Cranes Software, a global leader in scientific and engineering products and a solutions company, ventured into the Enterprise Consulting and Solutions space, with a portfolio of high-end products and operations at global scale. Cranes Software is confident of tapping the growing offshore IT outsourcing market, via its direct presence under the wholly owned subsidiaries in the United States and Europe and its partnerships in the Asia Pacific region including Australia and New Zealand.
The key to success in this part of the world is the company’s vision of “establishing a direct presence in the region through extended partnerships” and the Cranes and Hearne partnership is very promising, said Clifford Snell, Associate Vice President - Asia Pacific Region.
Unique Business Model
Realising that generic IT services have become commodities, Cranes Enterprise Solutions (CES) decided not to actively pursue the market in the low-end of IT services value chain, but to focus on emerging market opportunities and high-end services like consulting. With a portfolio of products in the statistical and analytical space, CES decided to leverage the Cranes association with analytics. Together Enterprise Analytics, Enterprise Project Management, Six Sigma and Knowledge Management were identified as the target areas.
Satya Mandal, Sr. Vice President and Business Head, CES says, “Our vision is to provide IT solutions that provide sustainable long-term competitive advantages to our customers. We are driven by a common goal of making our customers more agile by augmenting their responsiveness and intelligence by providing high-end IT solutions.”
CES Enterprise Analytics practice has trained professionals and consultants with more than 150 man-years of experience in providing a wide variety of specialised data warehousing services. “By leveraging our expertise of developing the SYSTAT range of analytical products, we have built customised solutions for addressing the business intelligence and predictive analytics requirements of our customers,” said Suneil Sharma, Enterprise Analytics practice head. In order to provide other services like reporting, ad-hoc query analysis, OLAP, data mining etc. at lower costs, Suniel has conceptualised an innovative delivery model called Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE).
The ACE model is a unique offering which combines the flexibility & cost-efficiency of the off-shore delivery model with the concept of absolute technology abstraction of the tool on the customer side. With the ACE model, the customer need not purchase the product licences – but only send in their requirements to CES and access the required reports over a web-based browser. By using the robust data security practices and BS 7799 standards, Cranes and Hearne can ensure complete data security.
Using ACE, the solution can be enabled using industry standard packaged products or using Cranes IP/Technology. In case of the latter, Cranes and Hearne will provide unique value to their customers by continuously enhancing the effectiveness and analytical capabilities of the solution to meet customers evolving needs.
Some of the industries addressed
“At present, we have developed solutions for pharmaceutical, retail, banking, insurance and financial services markets”, said Sumeet Anand, Head of Solutions Consulting at Cranes. In the pharmaceutical area, the focus is on drug discovery stage, pre-clinical stage, clinical stage and marketing. For banking industry, CES has developed solutions for risk management analytics, CRM analytics and product evaluation management analytics. For retail industry, business intelligence solutions like market basket analysis, retail KPI focus etc. are developed.
In such a short span, CES Enterprise Analytics has already signed up several major projects. In the financial services industry, CES has already developed an advanced automated trading solution for trading on the cash and derivatives market of National Stock Exchange of India Limited.
Enterprise Project Management (EPM) is another area on which CES is working aggressively as it is going to help tremendously in fulfilling delivery commitments well on time and on budget. Ajay Singhal, Assistant Vice President and Delivery head says they are already working on developing and customising an EPM solution for one of the leading global Fortune 500 corporations. CES is providing end-to-end services to its EPM customers by providing customisation, implementation, end user training and post implementation support.
Six Sigma and Enterprise Knowledge Management
The Six Sigma practice at CES is headed by Amitabh Chattopadhyay, an ex-employee and Master Black Belt of Satyam Computer Services Limited, with an expertise in training more than 350 Black belts, 2000 Green belts and closing numerous projects.
The Hearne/Crane partnership is confident of tapping the market of Six Sigma consulting, implementation and training, by leveraging their SYSTAT range of products and several man years of collective experience in this area of consultancy.
Enterprise Knowledge Management (EKM) is another area on which CES is building its capabilities. As EKM is the next big thing in building organisation performance differentials, Cranes fits perfectly into Hearne’s portfolio of solutions for managing complex organisations. By using the holistic EKM framework that addresses the people, process and technology aspects of KM, the partnership can offer unique benefits to Australian and New Zealand customers. These skills constitute an innovative approach to identifying the knowledge needs of the people across the enterprise and ensure that EKM solutions results in win-win situations for all the stakeholders.
Besides this, CES Enterprise Applications practice is also concentrating on Intelligent Applications like Manufacturing Process Optimisation, Distribution Optimisation, Industrial Process monitoring and Control, Kuntal Choudhary explains. In line with the objective of providing solutions for agile enterprises, the Hearne/Cranes partnership should transform the enterprise applications from the league of operational systems to intelligent systems. By embedding capabilities in Enterprise Analytics and Enterprise Applications, there is the real potential to develop solutions that not only support the organisation’s operations, but also provide intelligent inputs for faster and more reliable decision making.
In the Australian and New Zealand markets, Hearne will play an upfront role, initially making contact with clients and overseeing projects from their Melbourne office. They are well placed to chase major IT contracts, given that they are a federal government endorsed supplier, a United Nations approved supplier. a quality assured company with Professional Indemnity insurance with Lloyds of London. In addition, Hearne has a database of approximately 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand who have bought technical software from them.
In many respects, the modus operandi is a model of how small specialist Australian companies can partner with much larger overseas companies in low cost countries. Management remains in the hands of local companies and Australia benefits from low cost armies of highly trained technical specialists. It brings enormous IT capacity to the Australian economy, while retaining local control and management. It also ensures that small local specialist IT companies can tender for major projects and create a secure long term future for themselves within the global IT market.
“In our twenty four years in business, this partnership with Cranes is probably the most exciting relationship which we have entered into. It has the potential to double our total revenue in two years,” said Dr James Hearne.
Detailed information is available on the www.cranessoftware.com web site and Australian and New Zealand enquires should be directed to Hearne via their web sites www.hearne.com.au or www.hearne.co.nz. For more information, contact ces@cranessoftware.com