Business Objects is targeting resellers to help grow its presence in the SME Business Intelligence (BI) market.

The vendor is looking to swell its reseller ranks and has claimed that the BI market will mushroom over the next few years. BI is an application or technology used for gathering, storing, analysing, and providing access to data to help users make improved business decisions.

According to analyst firm Gartner, the worldwide BI market is projected to be worth $3bn by 2009, while in 2006 the market is estimated to reach $2.5bn, a six per cent increase from last year.

John Wilkinson, mid-market sales director for northern Europe at Business Objects, said: “We have various routes to market depending on the customers, but for the SME market we have a two-tier model. For more sophisticated business intelligence we go through VARs, with 25 key resellers, but we are looking to double that over the next two years.”

Wilkinson said Business Objects wants 15 resellers this year that have access to the SME market and may already be reselling ERP, CRM, supply chain management or financial applications from Sage.

Phil Wood, product and solutions marketing manager at Business Objects, said despite projected growth the BI market is under penetrated and Business Objects wants to use the channel to reach out to the mid-market.

Gareth Horton, product manger at BI vendor Datawatch, said: “BI is growing and our main revenue is coming from the channel. We pull information from reports and place it in databases to provide a summary or analysis.”

Horton added that software giant Microsoft is also taking BI seriously, and will build BI capabilities into new versions of Excel and its forthcoming operating system.

Rasmus Andsbjerg, research analyst at market watcher IDC, said: “BI is growing as it can help firms utilise data and improve customer relationships.”

Andsbjerg added that as an increased number of firms use software applications to store data, the demand for BI will continue to rise.

trevor_treharne@vnu.co.uk