Briefs

By Barney Beal, 27 Jul 2006 | SearchCRM.com

IDC released its latest report on the market share leaders for BI technology Wednesday, and once again Business Objects SA tops the list, though SAS Institute Inc. is gaining ground.

Business Objects, with dual headquarters in Paris and San Jose, Calif., had the biggest portion of the market in 2005 with a 13.9% share, according to IDC. It is followed by SAS at 10.2% and Cognos Inc. at 9.9%. Microsoft, which had a 6.2% share, grew the fastest from 2004 to 2005 by adding an additional 25.5% in license and maintenance.

The Framingham, Mass.-based research firm placed the worldwide market for license and maintenance of BI, defined as analytic and query reporting and analysis tools, at $5.7 billion in 2005, a growth of 11.5%.

The top vendors are also seeing increased competition from database providers like Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle Corp., which increased its market share last year to 4.3%. With its acquisition of Siebel, Oracle is making the CRM vendor's analytics package the centerpiece of its BI portfolio moving forward. Oracle clearly increased it marketing efforts in BI in 2005 and will continue at above-market growth rates in the sector for the next 15 years, according to the report.

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Additionally, enterprise search and data mining is emerging as a key trend as companies seek to derive value from unstructured information across the organization. Search technology has the potential to displace traditional BI tools in certain ad hoc and information retrieval use cases, the report says.

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