Business Intelligence (BI), analytic applications and performance management software sales grew robustly in 2011 by 16.4 percent from the previous year, totallying $12.2 billion, according to Gartner. BI software now ranks as the second fastest growing business software sector. An earlier survey by Gartner showed that CIOs rank BI as their top technology priority for 2012.
Two factors are making the BI area hot.
- CIOs rank BI a top priority and, despite tight budgets, are finding ways to allocate money for BI projects
- Departments outside of IT are able to independently purchase cloud-based and self-service analytic tools
The top five vendors in the BI market are SAP, Oracle, SAS Institute, IBM and Microsoft. SAP’s revenues from BI and analytics account for roughly one-quarter of all worldwide BI sales. The top five vendors are expected to continue to dominate the BI market, but Gartner sees BI as ripe for startups and expects that the market could support more than 100 small but “hyper-growth” vendors. There will also be considerable acquisition, integration and cross-selling.
Dan Sommer, principal analyst at Gartner, said that ”In no way is Business Intelligence a market with closed opportunities. 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.”
