Critical Analysis of Expansion Strategies of SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft in the area of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) industry has emerged as a high growth area. Recognizing this fact, both pure play vendors as well as big application and infrastructure vendors are trying different strategies to increase their market shares. The paper starts with a discussion of BI industry since 2002 to understand the underlying dynamics of the BI industry. It is followed by analysis of BI growth strategies of big four application and infrastructure vendors—SAP, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft—to get a bigger pie of the market. The paper also analyzes the customer reactions to the new BI paradigm, impact of the acquisition on BI market and concluding remarks on the acquisition of pure play vendors by big four.