Business Intelligence market bucks trend to grow 21.7%

The business intelligence market grew by 21.7% in 2008, driven on by new focus on the sector after acquisitions by big vendors and growing demand for business transparency.

Revenues for business intelligence, analytics and performance management software hit $8.8 billion in 2008, up from $7.2 billion in 2007.

Dan Sommer, senior research analyst at Gartner said: “Industry consolidation has led to an increase in growth, despite the necessary product rationalizations and organizational changes. The large stack vendors, especially the application vendors, have put a lot of focus and sales power behind their newly acquired BI products, with accelerated migrations and upgrades in the installed base as a result.”

Market leader was SAP, following the acquisition of Business Objects, with 23.8% of the overall market revenues, followed by SAS Institute and Oracle with 14.6% market share, then IBM with 11.3% and Microsoft with 7.7%.

Mid-tier independent vendors in the enterprise BI space struggled, Sommer said, indicating that buying trends are splitting between stack-centric solutions or smaller tactical departmental levels.

While both BI platforms and the analytic applications and performance management performed strongly with growth rates of 20.4% and 24.3% respectively, the market is not expected to maintain the same growth in 2009 said Sommer.

“In tough times, the first step is to increase transparency which helps identify cost-centres, and then to more tightly align strategy with execution. This is why demand for BI, analytics and performance management is relatively strong even in a bearish economy. However, we don’t expect these two markets to sustain the same high growth rate in 2009, as much of it came from the lowest-hanging fruit in up-selling products of an acquired company to an existing installed base and because the first half of 2009 was softer due to the recession,” he added.