Companies Still Bullish On Business Intelligence Spending

April 16, 2012 Dan Burger

Researchers at Gartner have launched another revenue rocket. Last week at its Business Intelligence Summit in Los Angeles, the company reported the combination of business intelligence and analytic applications and performance management software soared to $12.2 billion in 2011. Compared to the $10.5 billion that 2010 generated and the $9.3 billion that fell into this column in 2009, it’s a pretty impressive trajectory. Gartner ranked it the second-fastest growing sector in the overall worldwide enterprise software market in 2011.

Gartner analyst Dan Sommer described the interest in BI as not being defined decisions based on either a build or buy. He says both types of deployments are popular.

“The strong growth was driven by two major forces,” Sommer said in a prepared statement. “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 number one 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. 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.”

SAP remains the big dog in this fight with 24 percent of the market. The pack of name brand competitors includes Oracle (15.6 percent market share), SAS Institute (12.6 percent), IBM (12.1 percent) and Microsoft (8.7 percent). That leaves 27.5 percent of the market to the “other vendors” category, where there’s a lot going on.

Gartner notes more than 100 vendors are making their way through this fast-growing IT market segment, some with considerable spark. The top five vendors will be watching this closely as they have already shown great interest in growing through acquisitions that create ease of integration and potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

When slicing the$12.2 billion pie, the biggest piece by far goes to business intelligence, which chews up $7.8 billion. Next in line is corporate performance management, which rakes in $2.5 billion. The analytic applications and performance management segment contributes $1.9 billion.

IBM posted the largest year-over-year gain. Its nearly 21 percent increase was followed by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAS Institute.

Traditional on-premises solutions linked to PCs gobble up most of the business, but the long-term forecasters are keeping their eyes on the cloud to bring about changes. Other agents that will dictate changes from PC-based activity are the impacts of mobile and social computing, as well as the ominous shadow of big data.

Because BI can be extremely processor intensive, IBM i environments will benefit from the scalability that can handle a lot of applications, a lot of transactions, and a lot of users. Its reputation as an old workhorse is well deserved, but the emphasis should be on workhorse. The IBM i Solutions Edition systems loaded with BI software are worthy of a closer look.