The days of strong double-digit growth in the
business intelligence (BI) market are over as the industry
enters a state of flux following vendor consolidation, increasing
maturity and price erosion, according to a report by
Gartner.
However,
the market
research firm insists that BI remains mission critical for
businesses as it turns information into an asset for deriving
insight and making decisions. Gartner says that firms should make
BI pervasive to business users by making it user-friendly,
collaborative and process-driven.
Gartner analysts predict worldwide growth rates in 2007 to be
slightly lower than the previous year, at 12.5% and will move into
single-digits beyond $7 billion by 2011, with a five-year compound
annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6%.
Following
consolidation among BI vendors, Gartner added that value to
users can also increase as a result of mergers and acquisitions in
the market. “Consolidation activities by SAP, Oracle, IBM and
Microsoft should help accelerate the value derived from BI,” said
Gartner senior research analyst and presenter. “Large vendors will
drive increased usage, while new BI vendors will emerge introducing
innovative technology and products to demonstrate differentiation
and fill the gaps in "mega-vendors'" product lines.”
Sommer added that increased BI innovation also means that query,
reporting and online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities have
reached parity and no longer deliver competitive edge. Most
vendors now include these basic BI capabilities in their product
stacks, including Microsoft which added more BI functionalities in
SQL Server 2005, Office 2007 and PerformancePoint Server.
Remaining pure-play vendors can recruit application vendors (not
SAP, Oracle or Microsoft) as original equipment manufacturers (OEM)
of their BI platform to provide analytical applications, or
leverage relationships with value-added resellers (VARs) for
domain-specific solutions.
Successful pure-play BI vendors will likely incorporate emerging
areas in BI such as dashboards, predictive modelling, enterprise
search, interactive visualisation techniques and in-memory
analytics.
Gartner advises end users of BI solutions from vendors that have
been recently acquired to hold strategic investments until a
product roadmap has been clearly presented from the vendor. It says
that even though there is no doubt that the acquired core
products—such as Oracle’s Hyperion Essbase, Business Objects XI, or
Cognos 8— will remain highly strategic and supported by extensive
research and development funding, overlapping products in a
vendor’s portfolio may see some defocus in the mid-term.