Forrester Research has recognized four vendors as leaders in its July 2008 report The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008 – Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle and SAS Institute.

The four vendors appear in the upper right corner of Forrester’s chart, where strength of a vendor’s current offerings and its strategy score the highest.

In Forrester's 151-criteria evaluation of 12 enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, says an excerpt from the report, “we found that IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects maintain their leadership positions, while Oracle and SAS Institute move into leadership positions in enterprise BI thanks to the richness of their functionality, ability to scale, and the completeness of their corporate and product vision and strategy.”

Actuate, Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, SAP, and a new entrant, TIBCO Spotfire, came out as Strong Performers following very closely on the heels of the Leaders, offering very respectable alternatives and a multitude of choices for information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals. New entrants to this Forrester Wave evaluation of enterprise BI platforms (though not new to the market) are Panorama Software and QlikTech, who, while lacking the breadth of features to qualify them as single, large-enterprise BI solutions, are reputable Contenders. In some very specific BI use cases, they even outperform the Leaders, says the report.