Analyst firm Gartner’s latest BI software research shows that the market will grow by 10% in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in 2007 to hit E1.5 billion. The findings also show that the BI market is facing an on-going upward trend, with total BI revenues rising at an average annual rate of almost 10% over the next three years, to reach E1.9 billion in 2010.
The report predicts that the BI market will become tougher for smaller players with a sole focus on BI as it becomes dominated by the major software vendors, such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Their BI tools revenues are expected to grow three times faster than the ‘pure-play’ vendors.
Gartner says that business leaders are now beginning to understand the innovative value of business intelligence tools to the enterprise. This is reflected in the findings of Gartner’s annual survey of 1,400 CIOs worldwide: for the second year running, BI has been reported as the number one technology priority.
Gartner did however counsel businesses to check that proper training procedures were in place for their BI deployments, because while in higher management levels BI tools are relatively well understood, this is not always the case among employees lower down the ranks.
