Business intelligence technology to weather economic downturn

Added by The Editor, 4 months ago.

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Despite widespread fears over economic slowdown, one sector of the enterprise software market seems well-positioned to weather the storm: business intelligence (BI).

According to figures from market analyst firm Gartner, global spending on BI tools will grow 11 per cent in 2008 to reach $5.8 billion.

BI technology was voted a number one priority in a recent Gartner survey of 1,500 chief information officers and IT directors worldwide - and analysts at the firm believes this enthusiasm will protect the market from the effects of reduced IT spending as companies ready themselves for a quick pullback should the economic situation decline more rapidly or severely than currently expected.

"The fact that BI has held the top spot with CIOs in this survey for three years running makes us believe that BI will be more resilient against the effects of a possible downturn in IT spending than some other technologies," said Dan Sommer, senior research analyst for Gartner.

In part, that's likely to be down to the role played by BI tools in enabling companies to pinpoint areas of inefficiency within their businesses and to model data in order to test out the hypothetical effects of reduced spending in these areas.

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Victoria, 4 months ago

BI always seems to be a top 3 priority for CIOs and its name alone clearly suggests why! But I think we need to remember the amount invested in this area is often less than that ploughed into hardware, mobile communications or other areas of the IT infrastructure. Remember most applications come with some form of analytics already built in too, which provides all the intelligence some businesses want.