Earlier this year, Sapient announced the launch of its new business intelligence (BI) offering. The goal of these new services is to allow SAP clients to fully realize their BI capabilities.

“We’ve been looking at what’s happening the market and how we need to transform the organization. We went out to our customers to understand whether the service would resonate,” says Sven Jensen, vice president for BI at Sapient. He says the offering has gone over well at a couple of large-scale trade shows as well.

The offering addresses four key disciplines related to BI: business performance management, information management, data lifecycle management and governance, Jensen says. A robust offering helps put the firm now in competition with some industry heavy hitters. “We’re moving now into a space where we’re competing against the Deloittes, Accentures and IBMs of the world.”

Jensen says he’s eyeing clients who have money to spend, but not a whole lot of experience in the breadth of BI’s capabilities. “The ideal client of ours is looking at larger than $1 billion generally, but is…depending on information and is ready to realize that they have to compete on analytics. Generally they have some sort of BI; it’s [just] not very sophisticated yet.” Key sectors for the firm include the utilities and gas industries and the retail space, he says.

“The key for us is translating information into value,” Jensen adds. “And I know that’s a bit of a catch phrase there. But what we like to do is tell our clients in order to be successful with BI, we cannot focus on cool tools anymore.”

Sapient’s BI services will grow over the next three years, Jensen says, and will depend on market conditions. For example, he says, “The market is not ready for automated compliance systems yet, but we feel later this year and the beginning of next year, that this is going to be a tremendous growth area.”