Blog: Claudia Imhoff

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2005 - A Promising Year for BI Vendors

Not all of the BI vendors have reported their financial situations for 2004 but, from the ones that have, it appears that they are entering 2005 with significant wind in their sails. Examples include the following BI Vendors:

Business Objects has reported $925.6 million for 2004 which is 65 percent higher than sales in 2003.

SAS reports a $1.5 billion year - a 15 % increase over 2003

The story continues with other high-flying companies:

MicroStrategy surprised the Wall Street folks by declaring a 39 percent uptick in sales growth for fourth quarter report. Ascential Software and Informatica reported an increase of 21 percent and 7 percent increase respecitively for fourth quarter 2004 over 2003 revenues. And finally, Hyperion's sales grew by 13 percent in its last quarter.

And on it goes.

In addition to these rosy financial reports, Forrester Research conducted a survey of 1,368 technology decision makers (CIOs and others) in North America and Europe and found that they plan to increase their IT spending by 3.9 percent overall and they were quite optimistic about their 2005 business outlook. Another good sign from the survey was that IT buyers are no longer so worried that their vendors were going out of business. TWhen the economy took a nosedive, many IT executives feared that vendors might not be around in six months because of the number of company failures. Now it appears that the vendors can make a profit and stay around.

So, the good news for BI vendors, according to the survey?

Business intelligence is still a top concern in the minds of CIOs. Concerns about regulatory compliance and the massive increase in quantity of data means BI still has one of the top spots at 9% of planned purchases. This bodes well for the entire BI industry, not just for the software vendors.

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