Worldwide BI and analytics software market grew 8 percent in 2013

BANGALORE, INDIA: Worldwide business intelligence (BI) and analytics software, consisting of BI platforms, corporate performance management (CPM) suites, analytic applications and advanced analytics, totaled $14.4 billion in 2013, an 8 percent increase from 2012 revenue of $13.3 billion, according to Gartner Inc.

"Overall, just like last year, the market is shifting gears, which is keeping growth in the single digits. At the same time, paradoxically, we're at the cusp of a series of tipping points which will facilitate unprecedented interest and adoption of analytics," said Dan Sommer, research director at Gartner.

There were a number of factors slowing the market in 2013. First, challenging macro had an effect. No region in the world grew faster than 12 percent, which breaks the strategic assumption that many of the large vendors have held for years - that emerging markets are growing at a much faster rate. Secondly, confusion still reigns around how to best leverage analytics on big data.

Much big data investment happened outside traditional BI in experimental silos, infrastructure and services. Thirdly, growth in IT-budgets is flat and IT-led traditional BI tools are over-bought. Therefore, some market share leaders targeting those constituents showed sub-market growth.

In the top spot, SAP once again had significantly higher revenue than any other vendor at $3.1 billion with 21.3 percent of the market, up 5.3 percent from 2012. Microsoft enjoyed the highest growth of the top five vendors in 2013, with revenue rising by 15.9 percent compared with 2012, to reach $1.4 billion.