Buyers Of BI Services Navigate A Crowded Landscape

Forrester sees strong interest from technology buyers in business intelligence (BI), including the significant expansion of existing BI initiatives as well as new projects. Key areas of investment range from implementing domain-specific dashboards through to an enterprise-level BI strategy and architecture. No matter the scope, BI implementations are never plug-and-play and require significant customization and are most successful when leveraging best practices and lessons learned from those that have been there before. Therefore, many firms investing in BI seek third-party expertise to support strategy, implementation, and sometimes full outsourcing of BI applications or data warehousing. BI services buyers face a broad range of options in the market including multinational giants, offshore providers, and boutique and regional specialists. Forrester recommends creating a short-list using our "BI Service Provider Short-Listing Tool" to find the right set of potential providers based on your technology requirements, industry, project size, and geographic scope. Once you have a short-list, dig deeper and use Forrester's BI partner selection methodology to zero in on a finalist.