BI Vendors – Who’s Spending on R&D?

The table below shows a sample of 6 suppliers in the BI space. They are all public companies (private ones  – Information Builders, SAS etc do not typically share their numbers). It may surprise some people that most technology companies spend much less on developing technology than they do on selling it – less than half typically. In terms of percentages, the giants spend less (IBM , Oracle), although R&D spend seems to remain at around 15% except for Tableau who spends a whopping 26%. This came as a surprise to me, as Tableau’s marketing machine is relentless and well tuned to market sentiment (business users want to do their own BI).