Rahul is the founder and CEO of Annik Inc, one of the leading Market Research and Data Analytics outsourcing companies in India. Having spent 10 years in the US working with some of the Global Leaders in Market Research, including NFO, now part of TNS.

As the President of Annik, Rahuls’ views reflect the paradigm shift towards insights generation, rather than pure data analysis and presentation. He predicted, "As clients continue to demand insights versus surveys and data, a new breed of company will emerge. It will leverage clients' in-house information and find ways to analyze continuously - collected data in context, using domain expertise. For these companies, technology will be an enabler-not the solution - putting insights in the hands of the managers who need them when they need them. This won't be about delivering survey results better and faster, these actionable insights will be multi-dimensional and come from multiple data sources (internal, primary and secondary).”

Research Business Report (RBR) by “RFL” addresses the technological, methodological and economic changes impacting the research industry. It delivers up-to-date and useful MR news. It reveals important product and service introductions that are changing the research world of clients and vendors.

Ron has over 16 years of sales, consulting, and account management experience dealing with mid-market and Fortune® 500 clients. He has had diverse industry exposure, including Automotive/Manufacturing, Energy, Insurance, Financial Services, IT, Retail, CPG and Media.

Ron joins Annik from MicroStrategy. His career has spanned positions at Siebel, NAVTEQ, Bentley and Intergraph. He is a certified Siebel professional and has worked on various IT platforms, CRM & System Integration solutions.

Commenting on this move Rahul Sahgal, Annik CEO said “We are proud to announce the opening of our US Office, a major milestone in Annik’s growth.  This new office will allow us to get closer to clients and provide quicker and more domain-specific responses to client needs.  By having Ron on board, we have also added to our capability in the Data Management space where we have developed quite a formidable competence.  Ron’s skill set and proven expertise in the Data Management arena is an asset to our team. As we grow, we are closely looking at the ideal mix of Onshore - Offshore talent to optimize our service delivery model"

Here are some key trends that emerged from this year’s Deloitte Asia Pacific rankings:

• The three-year average revenue growth for all 500 companies significantly increased from 399 percent in 2006 to a notable 540 percent in 2007, a 141 percent growth from last year’s figures. The record level surpasses the previous highpoint reached in 2005 (518 percent) and 285 percent in 2002, when the rankings started with 250 winners. (The field was subsequently expanded to 500 in 2004.) The current high growth is mirrored in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
  
  
• Taiwan is home to the largest number of fast-growing companies in this year’s ranking (99 companies). India’s contribution of ranked companies grew from 54 in 2006 to 82 this year, indicating India’s emergence as a tech-acceleration nation.
  
  
• South Korea's representation declined by 18 percent to 82 companies though it still remains among the top 10. Japan and New Zealand increased their contribution of companies by 21 percent and 22 percent respectively, from the 2006 program.
  
  
• The top-performing sector in 2007 is software with 129 fast-growing software companies making the rankings. Semiconductor, components and electronics and the communications/networking sector are gradually catching up with 120 and 83 ranked companies respectively.

Market research & Analytics is widely considered as ‘science’ and there is little doubt that the discipline is strongly imbedded into the sound principles of mathematics and statistics.  However the MR professionals will strongly agree that in practice it is as ‘art’ as science and it is this ‘art’ that differentiates a researcher from the rest.

Contrary to the popular notion the beauty of a ‘piece of research’ lies more in its utility value than the tools and technique used. Sometimes researchers need to stretch beyond their study to show the utility value. Here is an example of how pure data interpretation needs to be stretched beyond the realm of science, into an art.

Once we were presenting the findings of communication & brand track to a pharmaceutical client when the client shot back saying he has little faith on the numbers. We stopped the presentation and after discussing with client we realized that the client has spent a lot on his campaign and there are many executions running. Most of the executions were approved by the regional team. On further inquiry we learnt that client has not done any copy testing in that particular market. We took the historic spend data for different executions for the last 3 years. We classified executions as ‘successful’, ‘moderate’ and ‘loser’ and understand their response to the spend pattern. Based on that we did predictive modeling indicating

• the kind of success client will achieve in all the three scenarios
• the threshold period required for an execution to get response as per the expectation
• the maximum response that an execution can get

We applied the model to our case and it was revealed that the support provided to most of the executions were either too short period or too little (in terms of GRP) to show result. This acted an ‘eye –opener’ to the client.

The reason we missed all these in our initial presentation was ‘lack of perspective’.  The client din’t give us this information till the problem was spotted. A Data is data it’s the ‘perspective’ which helps to draw an insight and that’s an ART.