Business Intelligence Market Thriving

According to market research firm IDC, the worldwide business intelligence tools market generated more than $4 billion (£2.5bn) in revenue in the second half of 2010, marking the first time the market has passed this mark in a six-month period and boding well for growth in 2011.

Moreover, IDC’s Worldwide Semi-annual Business Intelligence Tools Tracker showed that for the full year of 2010, the BI tools market grew 12.7 percent year over year, adding $893 million (£557m) in global revenue over the previous year.

“2010 was a solid year for the BI tools market, and our models indicate that growth will continue throughout the five-year forecast period,” Dan Vesset, programme vice president for business analytics at IDC, said in a statement. “Business analytics remains one of the top priorities for most organisations, and BI tools are one of the key enabling technologies for more pervasive business analytics.

“To continue growing in the BI tools market, vendors need to align their technology packaging and pricing with the growing preference among end-users for departmental and incremental projects and subscription pricing. Although the latter still represents only a small portion of the BI tools market, SaaS [software-as-a-service] or cloud BI offerings are growing three times faster than the rest of the market,” he said.

Also, according to IDC, for the full year of 2010, SAP and IBM were the top two BI tools vendors, capturing more than $1 billion (£624m) each in software revenue over the year. SAP saw strong growth in a number of large country markets, including Australia, Canada and Russia. IBM’s performance was bolstered by strong results in Australia, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom. The top 10 vendors accounted for 72 percent of the overall market in 2010, with four vendors – MicroStrategy, Oracle, Panorama Software and QlikTech – outperforming the market in terms of year-on-year growth. A total of 58 vendors were included in the IDC Q2 2010 market results, the company said.

Large country growth

The end-user query, reporting and analysis functional market enjoyed a stronger growth rate for the year, up 13.7 percent over 2009. Russia delivered strong performance in this functional market, with annual growth of more than 200 percent, IDC said. Australia, Canada, India, Korea and PRC also had growth rates above the global average. In addition, Brazil and Russia broke through the $100 million (£62.5m) revenue mark in 2010, joining eight other major countries with annual revenue over this level.

In comparison, the advanced analytics functional market grew 8.6 percent year over year in 2010, with three large country markets – Australia, Brazil and India – growing more than 30 percent year on year in 2010. IDC expects these three large country markets, plus Canada, Korea and Russia, to achieve double-digit growth rates in 2011, the company said.

IDC’s Worldwide Semi-annual Business Intelligence Tools Tracker provides total market size and vendor share for the following functional markets: end user, query, reporting and analysis; and advanced analytics software. Measurement for this tracker is total software revenue, which includes licence plus maintenance plus SaaS and other subscription revenue. The tracker covers six geographic regions with country-level data for 13 nations. Annual five-year market forecasts for this tracker are updated biannually and include five-year annual market projections. Forecasts are available at worldwide, regional and country levels, IDC said.