Indian BI market to grow 16 pc in 2011

  

MUMBAI, INDIA: The market for business intelligence (BI) software in India is expected to grow 15.7 per cent to $65.4 million in 2011 compared to last year, according to Gartner Inc., a provider of IT research and advisory services.

Gartner expects that the market for BI platforms will remain one of the fastest growing software markets despite sluggish economic growth in most regions. Organisations continue to turn to BI as a vital tool for smarter, more agile and efficient business, and they increase the current usage scenario from just an information delivery mechanism.

“It's a sign of the strategic importance of BI that investment remains strong,” said Bhavish Sood, research director at Gartner. “This market segment has remained strong because the dominant vendors continued to put BI, analytics and performance management at the centre of their messaging, while end-user organisations largely continued their BI projects, hoping that resulting transparency and insight will enable them to cut costs and improve productivity and agility down the line.”

BI will allow enterprises to make more fact-based decisions. It promotes revenue growth and faster innovation through shorter product and service life cycles and the ability to find where value is being created in the business.

Sood also said the demand side of the BI platform market in 2010 was defined by an intensified struggle between business users' need for ease of use and flexibility on the one hand, and IT's need for standards and control on the other.

“With ‘ease of use’ now surpassing ‘functionality’ for the first time as the dominant BI platform buying criterion, vocal, demanding and influential business users are increasingly driving BI purchasing decisions, most often choosing easier to use data discovery tools over traditional BI platforms - with or without IT's consent,” he said.

Gartner has identified three major demand-side factors that continue to expand use and drive BI platform revenue growth - consumerisation of BI, support for extreme data performance, and emerging data sources and BI as a decision platform.

The firm also forecasts that worldwide BI software market revenue will grow 9.7 per cent to reach $10.8 billion.

According to a survey by Gartner, BI ranked number five on the list of the top 10 technology priorities in 2011.