The Business Analytics Software Biz Is Booming

Published: January 30, 2012

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Wherever the IT money is being spent, market researchers like IDC and Gartner have to be there to dice and slice who gets what money and in turn make money on that data. That's why IDC has just launched a semi-annual tracking service for the data analytics market, and it would not be surprising for it to eventually go quarterly like IDC and Gartner have for servers, storage, PCs, and other IT expenses.

IDC's prognosticators reckon that this year the market for business analytics software will grow by 8.9 percent, to $33.9 billion. Of the 12 sub-sectors in the business analytics market that IDC is now tracking, five of them--end-user query, reporting, and analysis; data warehouse management; financial performance and strategy management applications; CRM analytics applications; and data warehouse generation--are generating more than $2 billion each on an annualized basis during the first half of 2011. During that six month period, these segments accounted for 73 percent of the total business analytics software racket worldwide and were growing, as a group, at 13.8 percent.

Companies in the United States accounted for $13.7 percent of the business analytics software consumed worldwide last year, which works out to 44 percent of the $31.1 billion market. IDC says that the U.S. business analytics software market will expand by 8.6 percent this year, a little more slowly than the market overall but that is understandable considering how robust sales have been. Across the Asia/Pacific, Central and Eastern European, Middle East and African, and Latin American regions, 15 countries are expected to post double-digit growth in 2012.

"After three decades, the business analytics market is finally reaching the mainstream market and a status as a formal management discipline," explained Dan Vesset, program vice president for business analytics solutions at IDC. "The demand for business analytics solutions is expected to increase as the awareness of the benefits of the technology and related business practices to improve decision making and analytics processes spreads. Although the market forecast is first and foremost dependent on the overall world economy, there are few growth inhibitors in the foreseeable future."

Oracle is the top business analytics supplier, with 20 percent of the total market and growing at 17.9 percent in the first half of 2011. SAP, IBM, SAS Institute, and Microsoft are Oracle's closest competitors and they all managed double-digit growth. Of the 300 vendors in this space, 14 of them sold more than $100 million of software in the first half of 2011, including Informatica, MicroStrategy, Infor, and QlikTech.

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