BI for the Masses

Does BI stand for Business Indigestion?

BI Tools market is dominated by the likes of Oracle, Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects and few others. These tools cost in millions to license,install and maintain and hence it is a hot market. There are so many different categories within the BI segment. The prominent ones are Ad-Hoc Reporting, Dashboards, OLAP (Predictive Analytics and Data Mining combined in some cases).
But who is the most dominant and looks like could emerge as the top winner? Looking at all the offerings by different vendors, Oracle is the only vendor that seems to have complete range of BI Stack and products. Being an Oracle Consultant myself this might seem to be a biased opinion.

With the introduction of Data Mining and OLAP engine inside the Oracle Database, Oracle has cornered this segment.
Ad-Hoc reporting - Discoverer seems to be more popular than ever and there is a good demand for it.
Dashboards - With Discoverer 10g and Portal you already have the ability to create robust dashboards but one tool that can really make a difference in the BI segment as well as the overall ERP market is Daily Business Intelligence known as DBI. DBI is the embedded dashboard reporting for Oracle applications. It consists of a range of intelligence pages for GL, AP, AR, HR, and other modules.