The Software 500 is a very useful annual listing from Software Magazine.  It is the one place where you can find a ranking in revenue terms of software companies, many of which are privately held and are can therefore be awkward to find out information about.  The list does have its flaws: it looks back at 2005 calendar revenues, and so is somewhat out of date.  It also bizarrely includes companies that are clearly not software companies but systems integrators, such as Accenture and Logica.  However, it is what it is, and is reportedly used by some CIOs as a “checklist” when evaluating software companies, so it is somewhere that even shy privately held companies want to be listed. 

In Business Intelligence we have the following picture: 

From a macro perspective, average growth of the BI vendors was a healthy 23% in 2005 over 2004.  Companies that did particularly well were Global Software Inc with 77% growth, Kalido with 68% growth and Insight Software with 42% growth.  Even the giants did well in terms of growth, though some of this was from acquisitions as well as organic growth.  This is a useful piece of data when looking at the generally quoted industry growth rates, which are based on analyst estimates of spend.  Here you have the actual revenue growth of all the significant companies that operate in the space, which may be a more real measure. This would suggest that the business intelllgence space had a more healthy year than was generally credited by industry analysts.