Microsoft-the leading BI vendor?

In a recent Gartner report, Microsoft ranks as the top business intelligence (BI) vendor outpacing COGNOS, Business Objects and Microstrategy, according to an article in InformationWeek. The report cites Microsoft’s bundling of products and price as the main attractiveness of the company’s BI offering in addition to its software quality.

As a review, note that several acquisitions in the BI space have occurred recently. Within the last year, Oracle bought Hyperion; SAP bought Business Objects, and IBM bought COGNOS; and in 2006 Microsoft bought ProClarity. The InformationWeek article suggests that BI is being commoditized or entering the mainstream, which ever way your want to characterize it.

Now, to the point about location intelligence. Oracle is already introducing Oracle location-based solutions into its BI products and not just resting on the fact that it is in a dominant position in supporting GIS application. Yesterday, I got a demo from SAP about how they are integrating mapping tools with CRM as part of their Sagres project. In the past, the BI vendors have acknowledged location is important to visualizing business data relationships but never indulged the applications except with arms-length agreements with MapInfo or ESRI.

Now things are changing. As BI players are acquired by larger IT companies and location technology remains in the forefront of the big players, (I cite the release of spatial datatype support by Microsoft in SQL Server 2008 and SAP’s continued development of Sagres as an example of this), location technology too will finally reach BI applications in a much more visible way. What will be interesting to see is how these companies demo their BI solutions. If they put spatial analysis as their leading show-stopper for customers, the days of GIS as a technology relegated to the guy making maps in the backroom are over.