Now traditional data warehouse software companies such as Oracle are making inroads where few dare to tread.

A Gartner Dataquest and Merrill Lynch survey, examining the top priorities of CIOs for 2006, found that business intelligence (BI) was identified as the highest technology priority at the time. This was good news for Oracle, which has made its intentions clear as the company prepares to take advantage of the predicted BI revenue growth rate over the next five years.

Last year, Gartner predicted that the global BI platform market would grow at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 6.5 percent, bringing the market to a potential $3.2 billion in new licence revenue by 2010.