Head to head: How strong is the Business Intelligence space in A/NZ?

Business Intelligence (BI) has been increasingly touted around for the past few years, but just how much actual success is BI finding?

Recent research from Gartner, which discussed the shifting BI landscape, found that for the third year in a row, BI applications have been ranked the top technology priority in the 2008 Gartner Executive Programs survey of 1500 CIOs.

BI refers to applications and technologies which are used to gather, access and analyse data and information about how firms are running their businesses.

Gartner analysts have said that the market for BI software would remain healthy but is facing radical change as acquisitions, new delivery models such as software-as-a-service and emerging social software tools are accelerating innovation in the sector.

Revenue for BI software vendors in Asia Pacific is expected to top US$399 million in 2008 and reach US$577.6 million in 2011, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.5 percent, according to Gartner. However, worldwide growth rates are slowing, and will move into single digits beyond US$7 billion by 2011, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6 percent.

“The days of strong double-digit growth in the global business intelligence market are over, as the industry enters a state of flux following vendor consolidation, increasing maturity and price erosion,” said Bhavish Sood, senior research analyst at Gartner. “However, BI remains critical for businesses as it turns information into an asset for insight and decision making, especially in high-growth markets in Asia.”

Gartner also believes that the acquisitions in 2007 were disrupters for the market, which, if they are finalised, will eliminate all larger publicly traded BI companies.

We get a local perspective on the BI debate and ask Microsoft and IBM: How strong is current demand for BI software in A/NZ?

Martin Gregory
Director of server and tools, Microsoft Australia:
Gartner has Microsoft positioned in the leaders quadrant of the latest Magic Quadrant for both data warehousing and business intelligence, and in the challengers quadrant for data integration. Our partners are enthusiastic about the opportunities this provides, telling us about their aggressive revenue projections and the investments they are making in their business to build their practice and expertise, which allows them to handle growing customer demand.

BI is a top area of investment for our customers and for Microsoft, and we remain focused on bringing BI and performance management to every desktop, maximising decision support and superior performance management across the enterprise. By pricing BI for broad deployment and delivering BI in the Office front-end tools that employees live in every day, the Microsoft solution is becoming an increasingly attractive option for companies, both mid-size and at enterprise level.

We are seeing a wide variety of opportunities for partners to grow their business with Microsoft Business Intelligence. The pervasive BI solutions we see customers looking to deploy often require technology upgrades and business process improvement. These are natural areas for the Microsoft Partner ecosystem to work jointly with customers to make these projects successful.

At the same time, new partner opportunities are being created in the areas of BI appliances. Here, hardware partners are working with Microsoft to offer pre-built and pre-configured hardware and software.

Mark Register
Vice president of information on demand, IBM Asia Pacific:
In Australia, as in the rest of the world, demand for BI and Performance Management solutions continues to grow. Just ask anyone trying to recruit skilled consultants in this area – they will all tell you the same thing – demand is far exceeding supply.

Organisations are demanding solutions that are more easily deployed, that work within their SOA strategy and are more user-friendly. In its most recent Business Intelligence software research for Asia Pacific, IDC found that the adoption of BI solutions by small to medium businesses (those with less than 500 employees) grew by more than 40 percent, with Australia recognised as one of the key countries within the region.

So what is driving this growth? The tremendous value organisations can gain by better leveraging their information is leading to a new awareness of the importance of information to an organisation. Information is now viewed as a strategic asset in most leading organisations in A/NZ.

Business users are now demanding that they be able to report, analyse, monitor and manage what is important to them. This has driven the BI vendors to accelerate their innovation and deliver solutions that are able to be used by the business, that can be used anywhere through a web browser, and deliver information to users whether they are connected in the office or through their mobile device such as a BlackBerry. Business use of BI, analytics, dashboards and scorecards will continue to grow as organisations take a more strategic approach.