Bright future for BI

Gartner's latest figures predict a 9.7 per cent jump in sales this year as software bucks the general trend

The global business intelligence (BI) software market will buck the economic trend and remain one of the fastest-growing software markets, according to analyst figures.

Gartner said today that the market is forecast to grow 9.7 per cent to reach $10bn (£6.1bn) this year and although that growth is expected to slow slightly into 2014, it will remain in the high single digits.

BI ranked number five on the list of the top 10 technology priorities for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2011, according to Gartner's annual global CIO survey published last month.

Ian Bertram, managing vice president at Gartner, said: "It's a sign of the strategic importance of BI that investment remains strong. This market segment has remained strong because the dominant vendors continued to put BI, analytics and performance management at the centre of their messaging, while end-user organisations largely continued their BI projects, hoping that resulting transparency and insight will enable them to cut costs and improve productivity and agility down the line."

According to Gartner, 2010 continued to be frustrating for many customers acquired as part of the consolidation frenzy of 2007 and 2008, as they upgraded and expanded BI purchases in line with their enterprise application and information management stacks.

Bertram said the demand side of the BI platform market in 2010 was defined by an intensified struggle between business users' need for ease of use and flexibility on the one hand, and IT's need for standards and control on the other.

"With ‘ease of use' now surpassing ‘functionality' for the first time as the dominant BI platform buying criterion, vocal, demanding and influential business users are increasingly driving BI purchasing decisions, most often choosing easier to use data discovery tools over traditional BI platforms - with or without IT's consent," said Bertram.

Three major factors will continue to drive the growth of BI, Gartner claimed: Consumerisation of BI; support for extreme data performance; and BI as a decision platform.