More Companies Buying Into BI, Gartner Claims

Global spending on business intelligence (BI), analytics and performance management applications rose to $10.5 billion (£6.4bn) in 2010, up 13.4 percent over the previous year, according to Gartner figures released last week.

The findings emphasised that organisations are increasingly looking to BI technology during the economic crisis in order to improve efficiency and gain a competitive edge, Gartner said.

Recession fuels growth

Even in 2009, when enterprise software spending dropped 2.5 percent, sales of BI software grew in the single digits, according to Gartner. Economic troubles created an opening for open source products, analysts noted at the time.

The growth in 2010 was prompted, in part, by stimulus packages, a general improvement in the economy and major new product releases from IBM, Oracle and others, Gartner said. The report noted that the rise in spending was also due to aggressive marketing campaigns by vendors such as IBM.

“BI spending has far surpassed IT budget growth overall for several years and it’s clear BI continues to be a technology at the centre of information-driven initiatives in organisations,” said Dan Sommer, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a statement.

The BI market remained dominated by major players such as SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, which alone took 59 percent of the market for BI and performance management software. SAS led in the analytics market, Gartner said.

Mobile BI

The company noted that while BI tools consolidation is the main trend in corporate IT departments, a number of different data discovery tools and analytics applications are appearing in business units.

A shift toward mobile devices has also been noted, with vendors such as SAS adding support for Apple’s iPad and Google’s Android tablets. Such devices are more suitable than smartphones for mobile BI due to their larger screens, according to a recent Forrester study.