I was reading an interesting article at Information Week about BI software sales in 2008: http://www.informationweek.com/news/business_intelligence/analytics/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217800991. It is very interesting that BI software sales grew 22% last year and that the top six vendors hold a total 75% market share in this space. Seems that when companies want BI software, a lot of them are turning to the vendors that are already selling them other major software applications. Also, with the consolidation we had a couple of years ago in this space, it makes sense that there are fewer larger BI software companies so they now command a greater market share. The power of the consolidation was that the acquiring software companies would have more software to sell their existing customers and this is clearly happening even in a recession. With BI growing so strongly (22%) in a recession, it will be interesting to see what kinds of growth we get as the economy improves.
