The ongoing impacts of the Thai floods are not expected to have a major impact on the business intelligence (BI) markets in 2012, it has been claimed.

Analyst firm IDC explained that the natural disaster impacted operations of several industrial sectors and restoration is expected to take months.

Thailand is south-east Asia's third-biggest BI market, IDC said, ordinarily claiming a 15 per cent share of total revenues.

But the crisis will only have a "moderate" impact on systems manufacturing, meaning technology buyers should still have ready access to business decision making tools.

Aishwarya Kapoor, senior market analyst for software research at IDC, said demand for BI systems is prevailing within business.

"In addition to corporate governance and regulatory compliance, industries are recognising the importance of generating useful information to compete and are leveraging these tools to gain an edge," she stated.

"In addition, as customers become more demanding, companies will need to invest on analytic tools to gain customer visibility along with speeding up their services."

The flooding situation is expected to slow the overall BI market to 8.6 per cent year-on-year growth, as compared to the previous forecast of 14.0 per cent.

"Although analytics tools will remain a priority, the decision making process is likely to take time as the primary focus will be on re-establishing their enterprises," Mr Aishwarya added.

Posted by Alex Boardman