Gartner says – BI and analytics a $10.5 Billion market

According to a new Gartner report, the software market for business intelligence, analytics and corporate performance management grew by 13.4% in 2010 to $10.5 billion. 

The software market share breakdown was unchanged from 2009, Gartner found. SAP held the lead (thanks to its 2007 acquisition of Business Objects) with a 22.9% share, followed by Oracle (15.6%) and the SAS Institute (13.2%). IBM, which has made analytics the focus of its recent strategy and has acquired a number of companies in the space like Cognos, SPSS and others, came in fourth with an 11.6% share.  

According to the report, the Big 4 vendors (SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) continue to dominate, owning 59 percent of the market share. In the BI platform and CPM suite segments, they hold close to two-thirds market share, while in pure statistics and analytic applications, SAS dominates the market.

There is ongoing BI tools consolidation (Visualization, ETL, Reporting, Datawarehouses) in the IT departments, while, at the same time, a new wave of lighter footprint data visualization tools and analytic applications are proliferating in line of business units. In-memory and Mobile BI are two new categories that are growing rapidly. We have seen a tremendous amount of interest in customers for iPad based analytics (CxO analytics). Business users care less about who they buy from; they want easy-to-use, domain-specific functionality and speed-to-market. Business users don’t want long deployment cycles. 

Gartner Analyst Dan Sommer remarked that the growth reflected uptake of an “information-driven” approach. ““It is clear that BI continues to be a technology at the center of information-driven initiatives in organizations,” he said.  We expect faster category growth in 2011, 2012 and 2013 as companies make more pro-growth investments and also make catchup data and BI infrastructure investments as they come of the deep 2008-2009 recession.

Detailed Marketshare Data

The detailed marketshare data looks like this.

While the Gartner estimate is only for software and doesn’t include Systems Integration, Professional Services and specialized software/hardware (Big Data [e.g., Hadoop],  BI appliances, Solid State Devices (SSD)).

We estimate that the BI, Analytics and CPM market is closer to $50 Bln with these included.   This is becoming a growing category in the overall global technology marketplace estimated to be $1.8 Trillion (excluding Telecom Services).

According to the Gartner report, “The global recession that swept the world had a major impact on markets and for a period of time, especially the first half of 2009, paralyzed them. While IT spending overall was negative during that time, the BI market managed to grow 4.2 percent in 2009.

In 2010, the global resurgence from various economic stimulus packages, general improvement in the macroeconomy and new product releases contributed to a surge in spending. As a result, BI software growth accelerated to 13.4 percent in 2010. As BI spending has far surpassed IT budget growth overall for several years, it is clear that BI continues to be a technology at the center of information-driven initiatives in organizations.”

Gartner Magic Quadrant – 2009, 2010, 2011

BI Spending Growth Drivers

Know Where You Are – Know Where You are Going – Know How to Get There – Know When You Got There

BI growth is being fueled by four factors:

1) Business demand for rapid access to new insight. This has spurred development of fast, what-if planning tools and in-memory analysis capabilities. It has also fueled interest in predictive analytics to get out ahead of emerging demand, risk and opportunity. Mobile delivery, cloud computing (analytics-as-a-service) and Big Data would also figure heavily in coming years. These are still emerging areas, far short of widespread implementation.

2) Speed of the upgrade cycle.  Many enterprise customers are now faced with what seems to be a Hobson’s Choice – sticking with an older (fully or partially depreciated) but more stable version of BI Platform that SAP, Oracle and others may soon no longer support, or moving to a costly, supported newer version but potentially hobbled by bugs and instability.

3) Continued investments in  foundational data and  information management (IM),  the below the waterline and messy part behind BI. IM includes data discovery, modeling, integration, data cleansing and database optimization—all difficult, time-consuming challenges.

4) M&A Integration.  Invariably just when IT gets its arms around existing information, it seems the business side invariably hits the reset button on BI and IM demands by merging with or acquiring another company. This usually causes several new projects.

According to David Kreutter, VP, US Commercial Operations at Pfizer Inc., “We’re taking analytics from a planning perspective to a planning, execution and evolution perspective. As a result, analytics has become much more operational than it’s been in the past.”

Top Vendors According to Gartner

Additional Links and Sources

1. For additional details see Gartner report “Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2010″ and “Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2010.”
2. The reports are available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1639015. and http://www.gartner.com/resId=1611814.
3. For a look at the vendor landscape that makes up these numbers see – The Vendor Landscape in BI and Analytics.
4. see this blog posting for an analysis of Gartner and IDC BI data:  http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/22444/decoding-bi-market-share-numbers-%E2%80%93-play-sudoku-with-analysts/
5. The Pfizer quote is from MIT Sloan Management Review:  How Pfizer Uses Tablet PCs and Click-Stream Data to Track Its Strategy

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Definitions of Different BI Categories

• Corporate/enterprise performance management software and performance management concepts, such as the balanced scorecard, enable organizations to measure business results and track their progress against business goals in order to improve financial performance.
• Business intelligence (BI) is a necessary business competency for improving decisions and performance.  the most widely used BI tool is the  spreadsheets. Traditionally, BI has been used for performance reporting from historical data, and as a planning and forecasting tool for a relatively small number of people in an organization. Modeling future scenarios permits examination of new business models, new market opportunities and new products, and creates a culture of opportunity.
• Data visualization tools, include mashups, executive dashboards, performance scorecards and other data visualization technology, is becoming a major category.
• Data analytics software and advanced analytics techniques, including predictive analytics, text analytics and text mining, customer analytics and business intelligence – customer, supply chain – data mining,  can help organizations make sense of — and gain a competitive advantage from — all the data that they have in their systems.
• BI platforms provide a range of capabilities for building analytical applications. Examples are Oracle OBIEE, SAP Business Objects 4.0.  There are many choices and combinations of BI platforms, capabilities and use cases as well as many emerging BI technologies such as in memory analytics, interactive visualization and BI integrated search. The idea of standardizing on one supplier for all of one’s BI capabilities is difficult to do. Increasingly, standardization and more about managing a portfolio of tools used for a set of capabilities and use cases.
• Data integration tools and architectures in support of BI continue to evolve.  Extract-Transfer-Load (ETL) tools make up a big segment of this category in addition to data mapping tools. Organizations must now support a range of delivery styles, latencies, and formats.