Statistically Speaking

North American businesses will spend $23.9 billion in 2007 on business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) solutions, according to an AMR Research report. Most of the spending will be on BI tools, with organizations expected to spend $6.6 billion on these systems, while dashboards and scorecards will take in $5.5 billion in 2007. These offerings are trailed by analytic infrastructure, such as data warehouses and data stores ($4.3 billion); planning, budgeting, and forecasting applications ($4.1 billion); and analytic applications ($3.4 billion).

More than 56 percent of companies with annual revenues of $50 million or more are planning double-digit percentage increases in search marketing budgets, according to Jupiter Research's "U.S. Search Engine Marketing Executive Survey, 2007." Of these, 26 percent plan to increase spending by more than 25 percent in 2007, while an additional 28 percent plan to increase spending from 11 percent to 25 percent.

Companies that implement incentive compensation management applications are able to outperform most companies in rolling out new changes or programs, such as sales plans--they are 50 percent more likely to design, model test, and implement in less than one month, according to an Aberdeen Group study. The study, based on the firm's survey of 206 companies, found that 76 percent of sales managers receive bonuses or commissions based on individual performance, while 65 percent of professionals (including sales representatives) receive bonuses and/or commissions based on individual performance.

The market for speech analytics will increase by 100 percent in 2007 and 2008, making it the fastest growing sector in the contact center technology market, according to DMG Consulting's "2007 Speech Analytics Market Report." The number of implementations has experienced a compound annual growth rate of 391 percent, growing from 25 in December 2004 to 603 in December 2006.

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