Business intelligence heading for the mid-market?

Hoping to find a market among mid-range companies for sophisticated business intelligence (BI) tools, Business Objects has launched specially priced applications for SMEs.

There are three options with a variety of different features. These range from a standard edition with basic facilities, available now, through to a professional edition with data-integration facilities, which should be available in the second quarter of this year.

The premium edition will be available in the fourth quarter, the company said, and includes scorecards, along with goals and metrics. Prices for the software start at $20,000 for a full suite of the standard edition for five users. No UK-specific pricing is available yet and, according to the company, pricing for the more expensive packages has not yet been set.

But at $4,000 per user, the software will have limited appeal for the smallest businesses. Business Objects' director of mid-markets for Northern Europe, John Wilkinson, said: "This is sophisticated software and it is clearly not for the smaller SME. But it opens up new areas for us. This will appeal to many companies who would have thought that BI software was outside their reach."

Not that Business Objects believes BI is an entirely new concept for SMEs. The company said over the past few years it has seen "a significant increase in the use of BI software by small and mid-size companies", although it did not release any figures to back up the assertion.

Robert Anderson, research vice president for small and mid-size businesses at analyst Gartner, said: "We expect to see mid-market companies increasing their adoption of BI, as vendors offer more targeted products that are tailored for organisations with fewer IT resources and smaller budgets."

Colin Barker writes for ZDNet UK