Speaking to ITWeb during a whistle-stop tour of their South African operations, Ken Gardner, founder and chairman of business intelligence (BI) company Sagent, and Arthur Parker, president of Sagent Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA), took time out to explain how BI has changed business practices in the past few years.
"Business intelligence as an IT solution is merely solving the same business conundrums companies have been facing since the seventies," says Gardner.
"Staying competitive was driven by a quality differentiator 20 years ago. However, consumers grew to expect quality as a matter of course. Then it was price that differentiated companies from their competitors."
"We saw the advent of customer service become the next big thing, and then we moved on again. Now a company has to know each customer uniquely to maintain an edge, and to do that, data has to be collated and managed," explains Parker.
"The fact that very few companies are implementing solutions which enable them to do this means that Sagent is in a growth industry and intends to reap the rewards," adds Gardner.
Sagent says shrinking hardware costs have made its solutions more affordable and the California-based company is using this as a spur to target the smaller companies previously unable to afford its products.
"There are many companies which have annual revenues of over $20 million, even in SA, and they are all candidates for the solutions we offer. If you look at the price of a Dell 4CPU server now, compared to a couple of years ago, it's obvious that our products are becoming more affordable for start-ups," says Gardner.
Neither Parker nor Gardner believes the weak rand will significantly inhibit local companies from buying the solution. "The question should be: What is the cost of not understanding your customer compared to the cost of the implementation?" says Parker.
In fact, Parker says the EMEA region has been targeted by the company to contribute the same annual revenue as the US.
Sagent will also diversify into other industries as the cost of implementation falls. Its current focus is on the financial services, healthcare and teleco industries. However, Gardner says the lower cost has made mid-size manufacturing companies an attractive sales target.
Prior to co-founding Sagent in June 1995, Gardner founded ReportSmith, which was purchased by Borland in 1994. From 1985 to 1991, Gardner held senior management positions at both Viewpoint Systems and Tesseract. He has also held research and development positions at Tymshare and is a board member at Commerce One.
Gardner says he doesn't expect to be going anywhere soon: "I've stepped down as CEO and I'm working with the engineers. We have launched another version of our offering and we are working on a Web-based service for our clients."
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