BI, Performance Management Software Market Surpassed $12B

Worldwide revenue in the market for business intelligence, analytic applications and performance management software rose 16 percent to $12.2 billion in 2011 from $10.5 billion in 2010, according to a report from Gartner.

The BI, analytics and PM software market was the second-fastest growing sector in the overall worldwide enterprise software market in 2011, according to the report. SAP remained the top vendor in combined worldwide BI, analytics and PM software revenue in 2011, accounting for 24 percent of the market, followed by Oracle, SAS Institute, IBM and Microsoft.

Oracle claimed 15.6 percent of the market, with SAS Institute claiming 12.6 percent, IBM taking 12.1 percent and Microsoft rounding out the top five with 8.7 percent. Other vendors claimed more than a quarter (27. 5 percent) of overall market share. IBM posted the largest year-over-year growth, at 20.9 percent, followed by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and SAS Institute.

“BI, analytics and PM have been identified as one way to filter vast and growing amounts of information to reach insights and decisions in the digitized world, which is transforming industry after industry,” said Dan Sommer, principal analyst at Gartner.

The report said the top five vendors continue to consolidate the market through a combination of acquisition, integration and up-selling/cross-selling activities with their stacks, resulting in their owning close to three-quarters of the market. However, Gartner has identified more than 100 innovative vendors that are jostling for position; some of them are in hyper-growth mode, suggesting the market is rife with untapped opportunities.

“The strong growth was driven by two major forces. The first is that IT continues to spend and earmark money to BI, despite constrained budgetary environments. Gartner’s 2012 CIO survey showed that analytics and BI is the No. 1 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,” Sommer said. “Second, new buying centers 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 Performance Management.”

In 2011, the market was still dominated by traditional on-premises solutions linked to PCs; however, major forces like cloud, mobile, social and big data will play a key role in increased adoption over the next 10 years, Sommer said.

€œThis will help shift the center 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, everyone will be touched by analytics in a much denser and more frequent way than today,” he said.