According to recent Gartner research, business intelligence and analytics software revenues rose 8% in 2013 — but that moderate growth is coupled with a market that is on the verge of a major expansion, the firm says.
In 2012, revenues from business intelligence platforms, corporate performance management (CPM) suites, analytics applications and advanced analytics added up to $13.3 billion; the figure reached $14.4 billion in 2013, Gartner reported.
“Overall, just like last year, the market is shifting gears, which is keeping growth in the single digits. At the same time, paradoxically, we’re at the cusp of a series of tipping points which will facilitate unprecedented interest and adoption of analytics,” said Dan Sommer, research director at Gartner, in a statement.
Sommer went on to say that those 2014 tipping points are that “half of BI and analytics spend will be business driven, half of new license spend will be driven by data discovery requirements, and half of organizations will consider deploying BI in the cloud, at least tactically.”
Gartner saw a number of issues impeding the analytics market last year: the challenging macro-environment; confusion on how to best leverage analytics on big data, so that investment was channeled into experimental silos, infrastructure and services; plus flat growth in IT budgets and over-buying of traditional BI tools that means some market share leaders who serve those areas had particularly low growth.
Gartner ranked its top BI and analytics software vendors globally as:
- SAP: $3.1 billion in revenue, 21.3% of the market and a 5.3% increase from 2012
- Oracle: $1.99 billion in revenue, 13.9% of the market, and 2.1% growth from 2012
- IBM: Revenues of $1.8 billion, accounting for 12.7% of the market with 4.9% growth from 2012
- SAS Institute: $1.69 billion in revenue, capturing 11.8% of the market and 6% growth
- Microsoft: Revenues of $1.38 billion; only about 9.6% of the market, but an increase of nearly 16% in revenues from 2012
Sommer said the market is currently in a state of “proliferating information sources, applications and buying,” and small vendors outside the top five have been able to get disproportionately high interest and growth, although with smaller market footprint.
“To counter, the big vendors are expected to dramatically improve their stories around becoming more nimble with data discovery and cloud this year and the next,” Sommer added.
He also noted that since analytics is “moving beyond just being a singular tool to become more omnipresent, embedded in various other applications and infrastructures. All of these trends, paradoxically to the single-digit growth, cement analytics as a top priority and will tip it to touch a much broader base, down to the personal analytics level.”
Meanwhile, however, the Obama Administration’s top legal advisor is calling for a digital “bill of rights” for consumers so that people can be sure that companies are not using their digital information to profile them.
