He said an increased focus on training will be crucial in 2007. A central theme at the conference will be data quality and integration, with visiting Gartner research vice presidents Ted Friedman and Andreas Bitterer providing advice on how to remove the 'garbage in, garbage out' problem to allow data to drive growth. As companies put a more strategic focus on BI, they are also taking steps to reduce the number of vendors and tools deployed in their organization.

In the past, each department bought their own BI solutions, resulting in an explosion of different tools across the business. Today they are looking to use the same systems across the business to ensure a standardized and rational way of analyzing and measuring the same data, and to increase impact and operational efficiency. The Asia Pacific market for BI platforms increased 22.7 percent to more than US$244 million in revenue in 2005, according to Gartner Dataquest's latest market share report released last month.

Australia represented more than 43 percent of the market and the top five BI platform software vendors in the region by revenue is Cognos, SAS Institute, Microsoft, Business Objects and SAP. Gartner warned BI vendors that price pressures, increased competition and consolidation spell tough times ahead.

"The big software companies are well positioned because they have embedded BI into their platforms and they are selling into a large installed base," Bertram said.

"They may not always represent the best solution, but they are easy to install for a company that already has their platform in place. As companies try to standardize, it is convenient and in many cases cheaper to keep the same vendor." "We will also see an aggressive push from Microsoft this year with the launch of Microsoft Excel Services as part of Office 2007 and the associated Performancepoint Server applications that will use Excel," he said.