On the one hand, there may be some advantages to having large vendors in the business intelligence arena. Traditionally, business intelligence is not a top-of-mind investment for companies, but rather a sort of afterthought once the major application decisions were made, says John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research. As large vendors integrate business intelligence capabilities, BI will be easier to integrate into that vendor's applications. Furthermore, investment in business intelligence may become more of a core decision, he says.

One the other hand, as independent business intelligence companies are acquired by the giants, many practitioners and experts worry that "the software provider you’d like to use will end up in the hands of a vendor you don't want to do business with," says Hagerty. Moreover, the company that does the acquiring may not fit into your current architecture; competing technical stacks may became an issue, he says. "What I'm seeing is clients determining which vendor they want to use, then the logical question is, Who's going to buy this company? It’s on everyone’s mind and that uncertainty causes people not to move or to move to an alternative that they think won't change." So market consolidation could make it easier to get BI, but users may be left with fewer choices.

Trend No. 3: Business Intelligence Expands from the Board Room to the Front Lines.

Increasingly, business intelligence tools will be available at all levels of the corporation. Operational business intelligence—which brings business intelligence to employees on the front lines—is growing especially fast, industry watchers say.

Boris Evelson, an analyst with Forrester research, says operational business intelligence will include offerings that integrate data and process dashboards, and event-driven systems that initiate a business process based on certain data conditions.

For example, integrating business intelligence into operational processes could allow companies to react faster to changing business conditions, for example, alerting a call center worker to offer a particular promotion or to potential credit card fraud.

Trend No. 4: The Convergence of Structured and Unstructured Data Will Create Better Business Intelligence.

E-mail, memos, voicemail messages and other sources of unstructured data are rich sources of information, and companies and developers are responding by looking for ways to blend structured and unstructured data for better decision making. For example, retailers could add comments and complaints from e-mail and call centers into a BI application to enhance their market segmentation analysis, says Evelson.

Hagerty agrees: "Getting information that's not in the typical rows and columns is the next logical frontier." He adds that this trend holds real promise. "This gives people more information to make the right decision," says Hagerty. People will no longer have to rely on "gut," but will instead have more information with which to make informed decisions.