Sales surge for BI heralds key 10-year shift

Cloud, mobile and big data to encourage market for BI and analytics apps

Sales of business intelligence (BI) platform, analytic applications and performance management (PM) software globally surged 16.4 per cent to $12.2bn (£7.6bn) last year, according to figures from Gartner.

That is up from 2010 revenue of $10.5bn, the analyst said, and makes the BI, analytics and PM software market the second-fastest-growing sector in the world enterprise software market in 2011.

Dan Sommer, principal analyst at Gartner, suggested that organisations have become increasingly aware that they can use such technologies to filter the vast and expanding volumes of information they must now deal with every day.

"In no way is this a market with closed opportunities," he added. "Key forces such as cloud, mobile, social and big data will play a key role in increased adoption over the next 10 years, and help shift the centre of gravity away from BI and analytics being only an enterprise IT push adopted by key stakeholders in lines of business, to one with a strong focus on the individual context, inside and outside the firewall.

"In 10 years' time, everyone will be touched by analytics in a much denser and more frequent way."

Sommer said IT continues to spend and earmark money for BI, despite constrained budgetary environments, and Gartner's 2012 CIO survey suggests that analytics and BI will be the number one technology priority for CIOs in 2012.

"BI projects remain relatively shielded, while a healthy portion of any discretionary money will be available for upcoming analytic initiatives," he said. "Second, new buying centres are opening and expanding outside of IT, in line-of-business initiatives, and taking an increasingly large stake of the spending pie.

"Key drivers for this are self-service data discovery tools, the race among vendors to provide business context through packaged analytics, and CFOs taking a renewed interest in BI and PM."

Meanwhile, the leading five vendors - SAP, Oracle, SAS Institute, IBM and Microsoft - are continuing to consolidate the market via their acquisition, integration and upsell/cross-sell activities.

Currently, the top five account for nearly 75 per cent of sales - even though about 100 vendors are "jostling for position, some of them in hyper-growth mode", said Sommer.