Dataquest predicts BI applications boom

Business intelligence (BI) applications revenue reached $602.3 million worldwide last year, a rise of 42 per cent compared with 1997.

According to research from Dataquest, the BI market will continue to experience strong growth and is forecast to reach $3.2 million by 2003.

Jose Sta, senior analyst at Dataquest, said: 'The availability of packaged BI applications has been growing substantially as data warehousing has been maturing and the focus of management is shifting towards real time decision support applications.'

He added that the proliferation of the internet, as well as corporate intranets and extranets are making the concept of BI a reality for the mass market.

'With this, it's not only analysts and knowledge workers that can have access to BI support, but also ordinary users of these applications such as line managers and operations personnel,' Sta said. 'This requires vendors to provide two standard interfaces: the traditional Windows, client/server interface, and a thin client, browser version.'

Because the market is relatively young, Dataquest said the majority of small companies are participating in the BI market. But the research firm warned that larger vendors will soon begin to expand their BI presence because of the enormous potential for growth.

'There is a shake-up coming as the BI market begins to mature, and we'll see bigger players joining the fray,' Sta predicted. 'Established enterprise applications vendors, BI tools vendors, as well as database and data warehousing vendors are all keeping a close eye on this market.'