This article is the part of Analytics Placement & Salary Report 2013 by Jigsaw Academy and Analytics India Magzine

2012 saw an impressive increase in the demand for Analytics professionals and Data Scientists. The lure of excellent job prospects within the analytics sector saw a rise in the number of students and professionals eager to gain analytic skills. The corporate world as well took big strides integrating analytics within all layers of their business.

India was seen to be the preferred outsourcing destination for IT and ITeS services. A highly talented workforce, lower costs and operational efficiencies among others was the reason for this.

With SAS reporting that their sales grew 5.4 percent in 2012 to $2.87 billion, they continue to dominate the analytics industry. However, analysts and data scientists are increasingly begining to migrate toward the open source analytical tool R.

Analytical tools that integrate Hadoop and R,
gained popularity, especially with small and mid-size organisations. Leading Hadoop distribution vendors Cloudera and MapR enjoyed significant revenue growth in 2012, with Cloudera’s revenue growing to $61 million and MapR’s revenue growing to $23 million

In India the common domains that Indian companies served in analytics were retail, BFSI and utility (telecom, energy, oil).These companies began demanding data analysis skills from potential management recruits.

They emphasized the importance of these skills in the recruitment process itself. Consequently Business Schools realizing the importance of empowering their graduates with these skills have begun to introduce

Analytics talent was largly recruited via word of mouth and from well established and reputed colleges like ISI, IIMs, IITs, Symbiosis, VIT Vellore, Ferguson college and St. Stephens.

[quote style=”1″]The lure of excellent job prospects within
the analytics sector
saw a rise in the number of students and professionals eager to gain analytic skills.[/quote]

Data Analytics and Big Data will continue to dominate market talk as data generated grows and data needs evolve. Though the analytics talent pool will get stronger there will still be a substantial shortfall of skilled data scientists. Today business analytics is all about analyzing transactions so we can see trends quantify what’s happened. Tomorrow’s business analytics will be about analyzing interactions so we can truly understand how and why something happened.

[quote style=”1″]India’s analytics talent pool will be in high demand because of their process expertise and English language proficiency.[/quote]

Our team of industry experts have put together their predictions for the near future.

Here are some of our predictions for the industry:

• The dominance of SAS is under serious threat from R. In the next 2 to 3 years, R could well approach SAS in terms of market share largely because of theiContinued rapid growth in add-on packages.

The attraction of R’s powerful language.
The near monopoly R has on the latest analytic methods.
It is FREE !
The freedom to teach with real-world examples from outside organizations, which is forbidden to academics by SAS and SPSS licenses

• Hadoop and MapReduce may continue to be the industry standard tool for big data processing but credible competitors like Berkeley Data Analytics Stack will emerge to gain a sizable share of the market.
• The last 3 years have seen an online boom in India
with thousands of online companies mushrooming all over the country. We predict a huge increase in demand for web analytics as these companies fight to become more competitive.
• Along with web analytics, social media analytics is another field that is going to witness a shortage of trained professionals.
• Text analytics has emerged as a field of interest. The field will evolve over the next 2 to 3 years and we anticipate applications of text analytics to expand and cover both inbound and outbound data, on a more regular basis. Several players are also seeking out efficient techniques to analyze content beyond text.
• Cloud based services like Amazons EMR will become more popular. It will open up BI and analytics to an audience of traditionally non analytical users, allowing them to focus on analyzing data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up and management.
• India will remain the preferred destination for analytics outsourcing as compared to other Asian countries like Phillipines and China. Unlike the BPOs, analytics (considered a part of KPO) requires skills that are not easily available in these countries.
• India’s analytics talent pool will be in high demand because of their process expertise and English language proficiency.
• The fragmented offshore analytics industry will consolidate with a few strong players emerging as market leaders.
• Indian analytics service providers will be challenged into providing services like model development, consulting and proprietary IP based services.