Gartner reports global business intelligence (BI) software revenues will reach $13.8 billion in 2013, a 7% increase over 2012, before growing to $17.1bn by 2016.
According to the analyst BI and analytics are the 4th-largest application software segment as end user demand for improved decision making and analysis drives demand.
"As more and more information is generated, business models need reinvention, and it's increasingly clear that mastering analytics on big data will be a key driver for the next economic cycle," Gartner says.
Complementing BI demand are more-tactical business unit buying (for department and workgroup analysis) and personal BI enabled by what Gartner calls the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information). However sluggish macro indicators and slow sales cycles will hamper near term growth, at least when compared with the 16% growth seen in 2011.
The data-as-a-service trend might also drive significant BI and analytics platform growth, since it allows organisations to subscribe to industry-specific data services bundling a narrow set of data with embedded BI and analytic capabilities. In time, Gartner predicts, most vendors will provide a data-as-a-service offering, regardless of business model.
