On his laptop in his office in Worli, Mumbai, 34-year-old Vikas Choudhury is painting a scary picture. The laptop shows a 1:1000 map of the Mithi river, whose flooding led to the deluge in Mumbai in July last year. The map clearly identifies six major pockets of encroachments by slums that have choked off the river and were among the major contributors to Mumbai’s worst monsoon disaster.



“The map is about three years old,” Choudhury cautions, before pointing out that, in the meantime, the situation on the ground could have only worsened. While he doesn’t quite say it, the inescapable conclusion is that, unless immediate action is taken, Mumbai is in trouble during the coming monsoon as well.

The reason Choudhury has such a detailed map is that Aurovision, the company he has founded and heads, works at the cutting edge of spatial data engineering (SDE)- a fast-growing segment of information technology that combines multiple applications like Geographic Information Systems (GIS), CAD/CAM and imaging tools. Use of SDE allows municipal authorities to fine tune disaster management plans, help utility companies pinpoint the most efficient route for their networks and also helps users in geo-referencing and projections. The Mithi river map, he says, formed part of a presentation the company had made for a multi-lateral agency, which was looking at funding some ongoing infrastructure projects in Mumbai.

In the past, Aurovision has used its SDE expertise to help Mumbai police track criminals using mobile phones and also government agencies like Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority to manage its housing assets scattered across Mumbai.
But GIS and SDE capabilities hardly make Aurovision special. After all, companies like Infotech Enterprises and Rolta have been at it longer and are far bigger. What makes Aurovision different is the fact that it marries its SDE capabilities with its expertise in business analytics and data mining to provide powerful business intelligence solutions to its customers.

“For us our SDE capabilities are the starting point,” says Choudhury, a double MBA from Pittsburgh University and NMMIS, Mumbal, and a former consultant with Accenture. “We overlay that with our understanding of business processes and data mining to provide clients with solutions that help in taking accurate business decisions,” he says.

Making SDE work


Take the case of Pidilite Industries. With 40 brands spanning 400 industrial and consumer products, Pidilite is the unquestioned big daddy of the adhesive market in India. What has significantly contributed to its success is its massive sales and distribution network. But, sometimes the size of the network itself creates a problem, as it tends to gloss over under-performing markets or segments.

With its combination of SDE and business analytics skills, Aurovision was able to build for Pidilite a customised solution. It allowed the management to query the sales database and produced spatial analytical views for value, quantity and growth of sales, as well as penetration index and market potential - right from territory level to that of the wholesale stockists.

“This combination of GIS and effective data mining has been useful in giving the top management an accurate view of our best as well worst performing markets/products right down to the stockists’ level. Since all this data is online, it is available at the click of a button,” says a senior marketing manager of Pidilite.

Choudhury says that, for the corporate, the uses of combining SDE with business analytics and data mining are almost limitless. He cites the example of one of Aurovision’s clients, one of the largest private banks in the country. “Some of their ATMS in Maharashtra were seeing heavy traffic, while a few others were not used so frequently. The bank wanted to understand the reasons behind this, so that it could replicate those that were working well and change those that weren’t. We took an e-map of Maharashtra, overlaid that with several kinds of data including demographic and socio-economic and then combined that with mining and analysing the data within the bank’s own system. This enabled us to come up with an answer not only to the current situation but was also predictive In nature, to a fair degree,” he says.

It is basically transforming any financial trial balance into a dynamic, interactive analytical service that provides visual and graphical evidence to support and immediately recognise when there is potential for errors, misstatements and frauds; therefore, Is a big challenge. So, Aurovision offers financial intelligence that includes on-demand service or in-house license; assists compliance; identifies potential fraud by wizard-driven pre-designed views and ratios based on industry benchmarks. These are developed by certified accounting experts for financial professionals to report and analyse data, and are completely automated solutions, built with powerful intelligence software, on a service oriented architecture (SOA).

Moving up the value chain from just GIS to business analytics has also allowed Aurovision to tap opportunities in varied areas - some where is was not even required, such as fraud detection and risk management. Aurovision has developed a specialised suite of application for financial fraud detection and reporting, a particularly hot business opportunity in the US after the Enron and Worldcom cases and the SarbanesOxley Act. Its application is able to analyse financial data and throw up graphically potential areas of fraud/funds misappropriation. The suite is finding increasing acceptance with the chartered financial analysts in the US.

In the future, more and more companies will want to mine their existing data and then combine it with smart analysis to make their business decisions.

Another example is its solution for managing market risk (or banks, which it is aggressively marketing to Indian banks. As a part of the Basel II compliance process, the Reserve Bank of India has mandated that banks need to manage their trading risks on a daily basis. It has decreed end-April as the time when banks in India will have to comply with this norm.

Aurovision claims it is the only IT vendor in India that offers a platform independent solution to this, integrating data mining from the bank’s system and then analysing this data. It gives top bank management a graphical reporting Interface of their bank’s outstanding position. The interface also allows the management to drill down to lower levels thereby ensuring that a Barings kind of situation does not arise. The company has already implemented the solution in institutions like HDFC Bank, Kotak-Mahindra Bank and Yes Bank. Several other banks in the private as well as the public sector are already in the process of buying the suite.

Enterprise performance management (EPM) is another area, which is a top management need today and in which Aurovision specialises. According to senior executives in the company, EPM market will grow to $2.5 billion by 2007, with a cumulative average growth rate of almost 12 per cent. Similarly, the US GeoSpatial market size will grow up to $3.5 billion by 2008 and the wireless market size is slated for growth with over 2.5 billion subscribers by 2009.

Mapping businesses includes:
• creating intuitive spatial decision support Interfaces by leveraging BI and GIS;
• integrating enterprise data with geographic data for analytics with a location context;
• managing assets and facilities for utilities;
• GSM-cell based tracking (alternative to GPS) for cost-effective fleet management;
• offering real-time location based services (LBS) for wireless subscribers, etc.

According to Choudhury, the global opportunities for the business analytics market currently stand at over $2.7 billion and are growing rapidly. “I believe that, in the future, more and more companies will want to mine their existing data and then combine it with smart analysis to make their business decisions,” he adds. Given its strengths, Aurovision is one of those few Indian companies poised to exploit this opportunity.

• Devendra Mohan.