While overall tech spending slows, BI spending may go up

The NYT's Steve Lohr talks with Forrester about the cycles of tech spending. Approximately every 8 years, tech spending outpaces GDP growth.

In 2009, according to Forrester’s model, another eight-year swing should begin. What will get it going? A big part of the next wave, Mr. Bartels predicts, will be the move beyond using technology to automate business operations like financial reporting, marketing and procurement. “The next phase is using technology, especially analytics software, to optimize business results instead of just automating business processes,” Mr. Bartels said.

This smarter software, in the industry, is called business intelligence software.

While Lohr gives big play to SAS, one of our clients, Tableau Software, might be a beneficiary of this trend. Tableau's data visualization software provides many of the benefits of products like SAS at a fraction of the cost, which should appeal to companies that are tightening their belts when it comes to tech spending.