An AMR Research report that was released recently that the North American companies will spend $23.8B in 2007 on business intelligence (BI) and Performance management (PM).The spending has increased by 9% this year.

Excerpts:

"We are nowhere near the business intelligence and performance management saturation point," said John Hagerty, vice president and research fellow at AMR Research. "The vast majority of companies say they will expand their purchases this year. While BI tools are still the largest area of spending and could be considered the meat and potatoes of this space, analytics applications as well as dashboards and scorecards are growing at a healthy rate."

The report looked at five main categories of performance management and business intelligence, which are listed below with expected spending in 2007:

Business Intelligence ($6.6B): Tools that help gather information and provide analysis capabilities

Dashboards and scorecards ($5.5B): Tools and/or applications that enable businesses to track key performance indicators and view how an organization is performing

Analytics infrastructure ($4.3B): Infrastructure to store, organize, and prepare the system of record for enterprise reporting and analysis

Planning, budgeting, and forecasting ($4.1B): Applications that provide a business with a high degree of flexibility to model and align resources, activities, and finances to meet strategic objectives

Analytics applications ($3.4B): Applications that accurately gather, unify, coordinate, and analyze content-specific information

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai