Ever since mainstream 64bit platforms emerged two years ago, business intelligence (BI) software has been touted as the killer application that will drive adoption of the hardware.

Some critics argued that the slow adoption of Intel's 64bit Itanium chip – jokingly dubbed Itanic by some commentators – proved there were few compelling reasons to deploy 64bit systems. But advocates of 64bit technology claimed its ability to ensure BI software produces faster and more comprehensive reports would ultimately drive upgrades, particularly as the data sets that BI systems have to analyse become ever larger.

It has taken a long time for the argument to be settled, but industry watchers say the need for ever greater computing power for BI systems is now the driving force many deployments of 64bit systems.

According to at least one source at HP, BI systems are behind much of the demand for the company's Itanium-based Integrity servers.

"People are absolutely having to upgrade [to 64bit technology] for BI because the data sets are now so big that staff are not meeting their service-level agreements because batch times [for analysing data and producing reports] have got too long," he explained.

However, it is not just the increasing quantity of corporate data that is leading to a growing dependence on 64bit systems to run BI software. More and more staff are using BI systems to underpin decision-making and this is also driving hardware upgrades to produce faster and more flexible reports.

Martin Richmond-Coggan, vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at BI specialist Applix, argued that the ability of 64bit systems to analyse data held in memory rather than on disk is improving the usability of BI software.

"Compared to using a data warehouse on a disk, it is orders of magnitude faster and more flexible to have data in memory," said Richmond-Coggan. "Users expect fast responses to their queries, and if they don't get responses in seconds they are simply going to stop using analytics systems and start using Excel spreadsheets again to do business analysis."

But upgrading to 64bit hardware is not always necessary to ensure the success of BI systems, said Christina McKeon of SAS. She agreed 64bit systems allow firms to produce BI reports faster, but added that companies should consider whether they actually need their reports more quickly.

"A lot of executives think they need results in five minutes, but they just don't," McKeon said. "You need to look at any BI and hardware decision and ask, 'What is the decision we are trying to make?' If it is something like pricing of products then you probably don't need hourly reports. However, if you want to help call centre staff talk to customers they need customer data in seconds."

Many experts also emphasised that hardware is only one factor in successful BI deployments.

Eddie Short, head of BI and information management at services firm Capgemini UK, said that the way corporate data is managed and manipulated is the most important aspect of successful BI projects.

"Business Objects, Cognos and SAS will all be pushing 64bit," Short said. " But BI can only be a killer application if you architect it right."