Increased BI take-up forecast in tough business environment

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 31 May 2009 16:33

IT Industry - Market

Despite a contraction in the business intelligence software market in the economic downturn, analysts’ IDC are predicting BI demand to expand from within organisations as users seek better access information.

According to IDC, despite the global economic crisis, the BI tools market in the Asia/Pacific, excluding Japan, last year grew positively at 7.7% and was estimated to be worth US$445.30 million for 2008.

However, as IDC says, this still represents a significant fall from previous years’ double-digit growth recorded for the region in 2005 to 2007.

According to Sharon Tan of IDC’s Asia/Pacific software research, with many businesses “knee-jerking” into freezing or slashing IT budgets as the global economic crisis unfolded, the BI software market generally contracted in 2H 2008 over 1H 2008 in most APEJ countries.

“Cost cutting measures and lower IT budgets are expected to contribute to longer sales cycle and more pricing pressure in 1H 2009,” says Tan, adding that IDC end-user studies conducted in 1Q 2009 also confirmed that “cost is the main consideration when IT decision makers in APEJ buy software.”

Tan says organisations are now likely to be more motivated to try alternative, lower cost BI solutions and delivery models which tend to tamper down revenue based market forecasts, and, at the same time, BI demand is expected to expand from within organisations.

"More users are seeking better access information, which is still one of the fundamental reasons behind BI adoption.
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