It’s no surprise that BI and Analytics is hard to kill; the value proposition is underpinned by a compelling need to understand what’s driving business results and making more informed decisions to improve outcomes. Sage apparently understands this and has followed in the footsteps of IBM, Oracle and SAP by acquiring a BI vendor to complement their ERP and accounting solutions. Gartner is predicting worldwide BI software revenue of around $12.5B in 2012 based on a survey of 2,300 CIOs and this excludes related services (…channel opportunity anyone?). Overall though, BI and Analytics is a bit like advanced technology in cars…first its available in a Benz but then ends up in a Toyota when the costs and complexities come down over time. The SMB space can already benefit from this “commoditization” of BI best practices and there’s a lot more to come.