The launch comes at a time when major software vendors are jostling for a share of the massive SMB market. As small businesses come to understand the benefits offered by BI tools, investment levels are expected to grow rapidly.

According to research company IDC, the global market for BI software grew 11.5 per cent during 2006 to be worth $US6.25 billion. Much of the future growth in the sector is expected to occur in the SMB space.

The latest Oracle BI offering runs on a single server and comes pre-configured and ready to use. Features include an interactive dashboard to monitor business performance, query and analysis tools and formatted reports.

But while it’s obviously got big designs on the global SMB market, Oracle will have to contend with intense competition from a variety of sources. At the top end, SAP is also ramping up its BI offerings, packaging them to appeal more to smaller companies.

Also, the pure-play BI vendors such as Cognos and Business Objects are running hard to protect their installed customer bases at the big end of town while at the same time looking for new opportunities among SMBs.

The other force everyone is watching is Microsoft. The Redmond giant has been bundling sophisticated BI tools with its SQL Server product and has a stated policy of imbedding business intelligence capabilities across its entire product range.

Microsoft Australia’s information workers group director Tony Wilkinson points to Office 2007 saying it contains a range of BI tools and features that link with other Microsoft products.

“Just as word processing was once a backroom task, we want to take business intelligence and put it in the hands of all workers,” he says.

One example is the introduction of dashboard capabilities into Office SharePoint Server 2007. The dashboard allows users to create reports based on data drawn from a number of other systems.
 

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