In order to consolidate a BI framework across a network of about 950 branches and 3,300 ATMs in 17 countries, ICICI Bank replaced its existing disparate report­ing systems and implemented a single enterprise-wide framework with SAS. The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform caters to ICICI Bank's need for flexibility, scalability and its goal to derive a 'single view of the customer.'

Enterprise intelligence
To drive enterprise intelligence across its branches, ICICI Bank needed an enterprise-wide reporting system to empower synergistic report­ing between applications that support the business and at the same time, offer flexibility to support the reporting needs of various business units.

One of the key param­eters for the evaluation of a solution was the scalability to support the growing data in ICICI Bank. An area of concern was support­ing the business if the growth in the number of users exceeded the planned number.

Prior to using SAS, the existing envi­ronment included multiple reporting systems that were cumbersome to maintain, and various departments still used disparate reporting tools. The IT team arranged infor­mation dissemination across the enterprise manually. In addition, bandwidth issues, security concerns with enter­prise data lying on desktops and ex­ponentially increasing data established a need for a user-friendly solution that could integrate all data sources across the organization.

The perfect fit
The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform was an ideal fit in this business scenario, because once implemented it would provide the bank with the key cornerstones of manageability, interoperability, scalability and usability.

• Usability: The SAS web-based solution would enable ICICI to provide information access to all users across the bank.
• Scalability: SAS can scale upward and out­ward to address a great number of queries from many users.
• Interoperability: SAS can talk to all of the bank's existing data sources natively.
• Manageability: Security concerns can be addressed with the SAS Management Console that can be deployed as one point of control in setting up permissions.

BI strategy
ICICI Bank was also interested in a data integration solution for its data warehouses and data marts. This helped broaden the scope of the SAS solution with the introduc­tion of SAS Data Integration for the creation of marts.

To address issues related to migration and scalability, SAS suggested a proof of concept and involved both the business and the IT users during that phase. The team of business users and IT managers learnt that SAS took one-third of the time to build a reporting cube as compared to Cognos. Cube exploitation clocked in with sub second response times, and the entire migration of the cube took only four hours, including un­derstanding the transforma­tions and getting the raw data in place.

The successful proof of concept was the key turning point for ICICI's decision to purchase SAS because their need for consolidating the BI environment and setting up an enterprise wide business intelligence platform had been created.

According to Pravir Vohra, ICICI Group CTO, adoption of SAS in ICICI Bank was in line with their strategy to consolidate their BI framework and establish an enterprise wide BI platform. “With the SAS Data Integration Server, it will now be possible for us to integrate our data sources across the enterprise. SAS Enter­prise BI Server will empower our information users to have access to the requisite reports through an enterprise-wide reporting system. Our partnership with SAS will go a long way in streamlining our BI strategy,” he said.

Subbalakshmi BM
subbalakshmibm@cybermedia.co.in

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