Gartner: Business Intelligence and Analytics are Fastest Growing Software Market

The market for business intelligence (BI) and analytics continue to be one of the fastest growing software markets. According to research firm Gartner, the global market for BI will reach $13.8 billion in revenue worldwide in 2013, up 7 percent from last year. The market is expected to reach over $17 billion by 2016.

The business intelligence (BI) and analytics market has long been the top priority of chief information officers (CIOs), but there are many unfulfilled tasks. Thus, each company has different departments, such as human resource (HR), marketing and social, that have not yet started inroads into BI and analytics.

The analytics and business intelligence offer notable competitive advantages because they allow exploiting new information flows and putting valuable data available to all professionals in real time. But Gartner noted the growth is slowing down. The BI market stood at 16 percent in 2011 and Gartner expects it to remain in single figures over the next few years. The culprit is the troubled economic climate.

BI and analytics have grown to become the fourth-largest application software segment as end users continue to prioritize BI and information-centric projects and spending to improve decision making and analysis. The report says as more and more information is generated, business models need reinvention, and it’s increasingly clear that mastering analytics on big data will be a key driver for the next economic cycle.

Gartner sees Big Data and “Data as a Service” as the growth factors for BI and analytics solutions. More and more companies would take advantage of services that bundle specific data with BI and analytics tools.

Although this is a mature market and has been a top CIO priority for years, there is still a lot of unmet demand. Every company has numerous subject areas — such as HR, marketing, social and so on — that have yet to even start with BI and analytics, Gartner said in the report. The descriptive analytics have largely been completed for most large companies in traditional subject areas, such as finance and sales, but there is still a lot of growth expected for diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive deployments. Since many midsize enterprises have yet to even start their BI and analytic initiatives, Gartner expects the market for BI and analytics platforms will remain one of the fastest-growing software markets.

The software vendors Microsoft, IBM, QlikTech, Oracle, Tableau Software, SAS, MicroStrategy, Tibco, Spotfire, Information Builders and SAP are named by Gartner as a leader in the BI and analytics market. A large part of these leaders focuses on data discovery and thus accelerates the trend in the area of decentralization and user-empowerment of BI and analytics.

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