Business Intelligence - Week of 01/19/2006 (Analyst Views)

According to Gartner, "The mission of Business Intelligence (BI) is the access to and analysis of quantitative information sources to deliver insight that empowers decision makers." Forbes states that Business Intelligence is a $15 billion industry. Gartner has identified BI as CIO's number two technology priority in 2005, in 2004 it was at number 10. InformationWeek showed that only 10% of companies it surveyed plan a decrease in BI spending in the coming year. Clearly this is a market on the move. The activity in the market is driven by a number of things, most prominent among them are: the amount of data and its increasing complexity, the number of data sources, an increase in the number of BI users within organizations, and the need for accurate real-time delivery of detailed analysis.

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q06
Gartner, January 9, 2006
We expect the BI platform market to continue to grow at a solid pace during the next five years, with new license revenue experiencing a compound annual growth rate of 7.3 percent. Organizations are increasing their spending, particularly as BI evolves from its reactive, departmental roots to become more pervasive and strategic. The long-term prospects for the market look solid, especially as large organizations embrace corporate performance management and work to comply with various government regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.