Gartner: BI, Analytics Sector Enjoys Robust Recovery, Tops $10 Billion in 2010 
Gartner reports the business intelligence (BI) market, including analytics and performance management software hit $10.5 billion in 2010, a double-digit jump from 2009. Garter credited stimulus-related spending, recovery in global IT spending and new product updates. The Gartner BI Summit 2011 happens this week in Los Angeles.
Garner said the business intelligence (BI) market, including analytics and performance management software hit $10.5 billion in 2010, a double-digit jump from 2009. Garter credited the results to stimulus-related spending, a recovery in global IT spending and new product updates.
“BI spending has far surpassed IT budget growth overall for several years, and it is clear that BI continues to be a technology at the center of information-driven initiatives in organizations,´ Dan Sommer, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Vendors aggressively market their capabilities in this area, so revenue growth is as much a function of vendor push as a demand pull.”
All three of these segments of BI showed growth from 2009and 2010. Sommer described the market space over the period this way:
In 2009, the difficult environment forced companies to focus on the 'bread and butter' BI projects they had already started, hence, upgrades in the more-maintenance-heavy BI platform segment took priority and grew faster, while sales of CPM and analytic applications suffered. In 2010, packaged application functionality returned in a big way.
In 2009, many strategic projects were put on hold. Tactical buying, largely in business units, took prominence, forcing vendors to focus on smaller deals. This benefited open-source sales and data-discovery vendors. While the trend toward smaller projects in business units continues, 2010 saw some of the delayed and prolonged strategic discussions finally close, giving those vendors that can do larger scalable projects a boost.
Gartner’s Look at BI, Analytics Vendors
The four large "stack" vendors -- SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – account for most of BI platform and CPM suite spending, and will continue to consolidate the market with BI-related acquisitions, Sommer added.
SAS continues to dominate the analytic applications sector.
“BI spending has far surpassed IT budget growth overall for several years, and continues to be at the center of information-driven initiatives."
Dan Sommer
Principal Research Analyst
Gartners
Despite the growing marketshare of the biggest players, Sommer noted that innovative new companies continue to make inroads into organizations thought IT and business end user adoption. “A new wave of lighter footprint data discovery tools and analytic applications are proliferating in business units,” Sommer said. “Business users care less about who they buy from; they want domain-specific functionality and usability that meet their needs.”
Additional details are available in two Gartner reports:
Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2010; and "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2010.
The Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2011 this week in Los Angeles will provide Gartner's latest insight on how to make BI in organizations meet the new needs of business after the recent economic shift.
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