I’ve mentioned the Gartner group before: they are a highly respected albeit commercial research organisation specialising in IT-related areas.

Gartner publish a regular overview of Business Intelligence tools under the heading of the “Magic Quadrant”. The latest report (published at the end of January) is here. This is an industry-wide report (all kinds of organisations, not just libraries): but it is sometimes useful to peep over the fence and see how other organisations are faring in this field.

It is encouraging to note that “…SAP BusinessObjects’ [the software that powers Talis Decisions] reporting and ad hoc query capabilities were defined by its customers to be its top strengths…”, and that SAP remains amongst the handful of leaders in this field.