Business intelligence: the road ahead

Abstract

When1 Hewlett-Packard was looking for ways to make money from its sharper image display technology, the company relied on a piece of smart software to help it find the most profitable answer. The application quickly shifted through opportunities, in much the same way a venture capitalist might do, and calculated high margins in large screen television, and thus helped company decision makers decide which market to target their product, HP executive Ralph Morales said. The program from the company SmartOrg marks a growing trend in the estimated $7 billion Business Intelligence (BI) software market that can predict the financial impact of future decisions. Such cases point to the growing trend among organizations to use applications that answer questions from data rather than simply create additional data. This market is set to grow by over 10% in 2006, which is twice the rate of business software industry in general. Therefore a lot of action could be seen in the BI market going forward. A host of existing players are fast improving their BI offerings; other business application providers are entering into this market including the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. The competition would increase in a few year/s time and Mergers and Acquisitions in this industry have already started. This report examines the Business Intelligence industry and tries to predict what lies ahead for this industry. This report can be used by the customers who wish to implement the BI solution for their business problems. They would benefit by gaining a better understanding on the Business Intelligence market and thus be able to decide better on what they should buy. BI product vendors and the service providers can use this report to chalk out their respective strategy in the market. It can also be used by students to understand the BI market for academic or career planning purposes. In this report we have tried to map the theory with what's happening on the ground to predict the future of Business Intelligence market.