European spending on business intelligence software will increase by 40% in 2010 compared with last year, according to IT market watcher IDC.

Statistics released by the firm showed that around a third of firms in the continent will significantly ramp up their outlay on BI tools, which provide analysis of organisational data streams.

Organisations in the financial services sector are especially keen to ramp up BI investment, IDC found, a result of the large quantities of data that such companies are required to analyse.

“The more mature a business is with BI, the more its hunger increases to do things with it,” explained Alys Woodward, programme manager for European business analytics and markets at IDC. “The companies that do not do much are those that have never really understood the benefits.”