If there's any good news in this recession, it's aimed at vendors of business intelligence software, according to BusinessWeek. With a crush of pressure to cut costs, companies increasingly are turning to BI software to gain insight from the reams of information they already possess.

For instance, Brinker International, parent company of Chili's and On the Border restaurants, uses BI to set staffing levels at each of its 1,700 restaurants. Juice vendor Welch's uses it to reduce transportation costs on its 50,000 shipments each year to stores.

The piece quotes Gartner research that BI software will be among the tech spending priorities for 2009, though tech spending is expected to remain flat.

At the same time, the piece points out that the software can be expensive, running from $150,000 to $300,000 for a large company. And that's not including accompanying services, which a Forrester analyst says can cost five to seven times that.

A Forrester report that's the basis for this Intelligent Enterprise piece recommends returning to fiscal and IT best practices for BI that can get loosey-goosey during good times and putting the kibosh on individual BI efforts, requiring everyone in the organization to get on board one standard BI tool.