BI Spending Seen Picking Up

Spending on business intelligence (BI) in IT departments is picking up steam, two market research reports said Thursday.

Ventana Research said its survey of 320 firms revealed that adoption and plans for adoption for open source BI is progressing more rapidly than previously understood.

"Eighty-three percent of organizations are considering, are in the process of deploying, or have already implemented open source BI," the Ventana announcement stated. "Only four percent of respondents said they would not deploy more open source BI in the future based on their current experience."

The second report, by IDC, said BI spending will be an emerging priority in IT budgets for the next 12 months. The market research firm said also that security, Web-based applications and vertical industry solutions are also high on the priority list for IT organizations.

In its report, Ventana said most organizations reported value from templates involving metadata integration with Oracle, PeopleSoft and Seibel applications. Ventana added that 86 percent of the organizations polled reported that they had received value from pre-built templates for ERP and CRM applications.The report was sponsored by IT solutions providers Actuate, JasperSoft, Noetix and Pentaho.

IDC's Stephen Minton found differing budget plans among IT organizations in different sections of the world.

"In China," he said in a statement, "it's all about the drive for vertical industry solutions, particularly in relation to back-office applications. Indian firms are moving strongly towards evaluating or adopting Web-based applications." He found that U.S. firms are shifting to a more strategic view of business benefits while in Western Europe, spending continues to be partially inhibited by a steady approach that lags the U.S.

Minton is vice president of Worldwide IT Markets at IDC.