(By Jeff Kelly, TechTarget)

The business intelligence market underwent some major changes in 2007: A slew of big-time acquisitions altered the vendor landscape dramatically; Microsoft claimed it was "changing the economics" of BI; and one city police department even used BI to fight crime. Here, the TechTarget experts make sense of all the recent BI market action and predict what 2008 holds so you can better plan for the New Year.

William McKnight

Senior vice president of information management at East Hanover, New Jersey-based consulting firm Conversion Services International

• As organizations round out their technology stack, most will chiefly consider business intelligence (BI) offerings from one of the mega-vendors already in their shop, such as SAP, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
• Mastering master data in the operational environment will become a needed part of information management, starting in Fortune companies.
• The value proposition for MDM/CDI will become clearer as organizations begin using it to address problems with customers, products, parts, and other "lists" they struggle with having too many of and having too little data integrity with.
• Operational BI will continue to grow.

John Hagerty

Vice president and research fellow at Boston-based advisory firm AMR Research

• Analytic applications will significantly increase in prominence. Historically, most of the attention in this market sector has focused on BI tools. Buyers increasingly demand information delivered to business users in the context of their role and job function within the organization.
• Recent mergers and acquisitions will further force the standardization issue.
• BI and PM will go pervasive. It's no longer an option to report and analyze metrics in isolation.

Wayne Eckerson and Cindi Howson

Director of research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), and founder of BIScorecard.com

• As BI becomes more pervasive and is deployed on an inter-enterprise basis, vendors who currently offer only per-user pricing will also offer per-server pricing.
• Near-real-time dashboards will be in demand. Users want fresher data faster to gain insight into core operations and business processes and make faster, better decisions.
• Event-driven analytic platforms come of age, as there are many analytic applications that require real-time monitoring and process execution.
• System and usage monitoring will take precedence. Monitoring capabilities, currently lacking in most BI platforms, will reach show-stopper status as the number of BI users in any given deployment escalates, and as BI becomes mission critical. IT will rely on niche vendors (such as Teleran and Appfluent) that currently provide better monitoring capabili¬ties than many BI vendors.
• Mission-critical infrastructures supporting BI solutions will become much more industrial strength in the next 12 months.
• A majority of enterprise BI customers will deploy BI solutions on clustered servers with failover and disaster recovery host sites.

James Kobielus

Principal analyst of data management at Washington, D.C.-based Current Analysis

• BI is quickly becoming SOA's crown jewel. The past year has seen a rash of headline-grabbing mergers and acquisitions in the BI arena.
• BI is evolving into tailored business analytics. Performance management (PM) is rapidly becoming a key competitive front in the BI wars.
• BI going truly real-time through complex event processing. Complex event processing (CEP) promises business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams.
• BI tools will be increasingly bundled with data warehouse appliances. More and more data warehouse vendors will pre-integrate BI solutions -- their own and/or those of their partners -- into appliances. Increasingly, data warehouse/BI appliances will be tailored, packaged, and priced for many market segments and deployment scenarios.
• BI goes collaborative. In 2008 and beyond, we expect to see the BI, collaboration, and knowledge management segments converge.