Worldwide Business Analytics Software Revenue by Segment and Leading Vendors: 2009-2018

Business Analytics

Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods.

The Business Analytics Software Market in 2013

In 2013, the worldwide business analytics software market grew 8.2% to reach $37.7 billion. The market is now forecast to grow at a 9.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2018.

Within BA market, the business intelligence and analytics tools segment grew, at 8.6%, reversing the trend of the previous two years when the data warehousing platform segment had the leading growth rate. In fact, in 2013, the data warehousing market grew only 6.4%, the worst performance since the recession of 2008–2009. The analytic applications segment grew 9.4% in 2013.

For over a decade, IDC has defined the business analytics software market as the combination of the data warehouse (DW) platform software with performance management and analytic applications and business intelligence (BI) and analytic tools. Key observations about the business analytics software market include:

• 2013 market growth rate of 8.2% was essentially unchanged from the 8.6% growth rate in 2012. The overall market is in a period of steady growth, but there is variability in the expected growth rates of the individual market segments.
• In 2013, the market experienced a noticeable shift toward cloud-based solutions. Although these cloud-based solutions had been available for years, supply of cloud services from the largest vendors accelerated rapidly in 2013 and is expected to continue throughout the forecast period
• Increasingly, the distinction between business analytics and big data is blurring, and the hype about the latter phenomenon has subsided. As a result, more organizations are looking to develop comprehensive business analytics strategies that address all of their data access, analysis, and management requirements.
• There is a broad theme of "self-service" in the business analytics market that applies to all user groups. This trend is putting increasing pressure on IT departments to address end-user requirements faster and yet without increasing IT resources. Methods used by IT to address this demand include relying more on cloud services, outsourcing, consulting services, and technology automation, including appliances.
• At the same time, IDC estimates that about 60% of IT project funding is now controlled or significantly influenced by business units. This has resulted in many more "shadow" IT and analytics efforts to support analytics and business intelligence needs of end users. It is part of the reason for the rapid growth of the visual discovery sub-segment of the end-user query, reporting and analysis segment of the business analytics market.

Worldwide Business Analytics Software Revenue by Segment ($M): 2009–2018 

Worldwide Business Analytics Software Revenue by Leading Vendor: 2011–2013

Source: SAS, IDC 2014

Indian Healthcare Market Revenue, Trend and IT Spending

Health care providers in India are expected to spend $1.1 billion US Dollars (USD) on IT products and services in 2014, an increase of 5 percent over 2013. This forecast includes spending by healthcare providers (includes hospitals and hospital systems, as well as ambulatory service and physicians' practices) on internal services, software, IT services, data center, devices and telecom services.

IT Services, which includes consulting, implementation, IT outsourcing and business process outsourcing, will be the largest overall spending category throughout the forecast period within the health care providers sector. It is expected to reach $300 million USD in 2014, up from $280 million in 2013 – with the consulting segment growing 10 percent.

Internal Services will achieve the highest growth rate amongst the spending categories – forecast to be 18 percent in 2014. Internal services refer to salaries and benefits paid to the information services staff of an organization.

The information services staff includes all company employees that plan, develop, implement and maintain information systems. Software will achieve a growth rate of 8.4 percent in 2014 to reach $98 million USD in 2014, up from $90 million in 2013, led by growth in vertical specific software (software applications that are unique to a vertical industry. These are stand-alone applications that are not modules or extensions of horizontal applications).

India has a new government, and the Ministry of Health will closely examine ways to deliver cost effective healthcare across the country. Delivering wide access to healthcare in an affordable manner will be a top priority for the wider public healthcare system.

The organized private healthcare sector will continue its expansion across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, as well as niche sectors like maternity and child health. We expect emphasis on eHealth, mobile health, telemedicine, public private partnership and leveraging innovative delivery models.

Source: Gartner, Inc., IBEF

Top Strategic Technology Trends: 2015

Enterprises have to look at possibilities to build solutions that integrate business value with intelligence. Gartner The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015 are:

1. Computing Everywhere

The Internet of Things will continue to expand, propelled by the ubiquity of user-oriented computing.

The mobile devices continue to proliferate with an increased emphasis on serving the needs of the mobile user in diverse contexts and environments. Phones and wearable devices are now part of an expanded computing environment that includes such things as consumer electronics and connected screens in the workplace and public space. "Increasingly, it's the overall environment that will need to adapt to the requirements of the mobile user. This will continue to raise significant management challenges for IT organizations as they lose control of user endpoint devices. It will also require increased attention to user experience design."

2. The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things will continue to expand, propelled by the ubiquity of user-oriented computing. The combination of data streams and services created by digitizing everything creates four basic usage models — Manage, Monetize, Operate and Extend. These four basic models can be applied to any of the four "Internets." Enterprises should not limit themselves to thinking that only the Internet of Things (IoT) (assets and machines) has the potential to leverage these four models. For example, the pay-per-use model can be applied to assets (such as industrial equipment), services (such as pay-as-you-drive insurance), people (such as movers), places (such as parking spots) and systems (such as cloud services). Enterprises from all industries can leverage these four models.

3. 3D Printing

Worldwide shipments of 3D printers are expected to grow 98 percent in 2015, followed by a doubling of unit shipments in 2016. 3D printing will reach a tipping point over the next three years as the market for relatively low-cost 3D printing devices continues to grow rapidly and industrial use expands significantly. New industrial, biomedical and consumer applications will continue to demonstrate that 3D printing is a real, viable and cost-effective means to reduce costs through improved designs, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.

4. Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics

Analytics will take center stage as the volume of data generated by embedded systems increases and vast pools of structured and unstructured data inside and outside the enterprise are analyzed. Organizations need to manage how best to filter the huge amounts of data coming from the IoT, social media and wearable devices, and then deliver exactly the right information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics will become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere.

Big data remains an important enabler for this trend but the focus needs to shift to thinking about big questions and big answers first and big data second.

5. Context-Rich Systems

Ubiquitous embedded intelligence combined with pervasive analytics will drive the development of systems that are alert to their surroundings and able to respond appropriately. Context-aware security is an early application of this new capability, but others will emerge. By understanding the context of a user request, applications can not only adjust their security response but also adjust how information is delivered to the user, greatly simplifying an increasingly complex computing world.

6. Smart Machines

Deep analytics applied to an understanding of context provide the preconditions for a world of smart machines. This foundation combines with advanced algorithms that allow systems to understand their environment, learn for themselves, and act autonomously. Prototype autonomous vehicles, advanced robots, virtual personal assistants and smart advisors already exist and will evolve rapidly, ushering in a new age of machine helpers. The smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT.

7. Cloud/Client Computing

The convergence of cloud and mobile computing will continue to promote the growth of centrally coordinated applications that can be delivered to any device.

Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal applications and external applications will be built on this new style. While network and bandwidth costs may continue to favor apps that use the intelligence and storage of the client device effectively, coordination and management will be based in the cloud.

In the near term, the focus for cloud/client will be on synchronizing content and application state across multiple devices and addressing application portability across devices. Over time, applications will evolve to support simultaneous use of multiple devices. The second-screen phenomenon today focuses on coordinating television viewing with use of a mobile device. In the future, games and enterprise applications alike will use multiple screens and exploit wearables and other devices to deliver an enhanced experience.

8. Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure

Agile programming of everything from applications to basic infrastructure is essential to enable organizations to deliver the flexibility required to make the digital business work.

Software-defined networking, storage, data centers and security are maturing. Cloud services are software-configurable through API calls, and applications, too, increasingly have rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically. To deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and scale systems up - or down - rapidly, computing has to move away from static to dynamic models. Rules, models and code that can dynamically assemble and configure all of the elements needed from the network through the application are needed.

9. Web-Scale IT

Web-scale IT is a pattern of global-class computing that delivers the capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT setting. More organizations will begin thinking, acting and building applications and infrastructure like Web giants such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. Web-scale IT does not happen immediately, but will evolve over time as commercial hardware platforms embrace the new models and cloud-optimized and software-defined approaches reach mainstream. The first step toward the Web-scale IT future for many organizations should be DevOps — bringing development and operations together in a coordinated way to drive rapid, continuous incremental development of applications and services.

10. Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection

All roads to the digital future lead through security. However, in a digital business world, security cannot be a roadblock that stops all progress. Organizations will increasingly recognize that it is not possible to provide a 100 percent secured environment. Once organizations acknowledge that, they can begin to apply more-sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation tools. On the technical side, recognition that perimeter defense is inadequate and applications need to take a more active role in security gives rise to a new multifaceted approach. Security-aware application design, dynamic and static application security testing, and runtime application self-protection combined with active context-aware and adaptive access controls are all needed in today's dangerous digital world. This will lead to new models of building security directly into applications. Perimeters and firewalls are no longer enough; every app needs to be self-aware and self-protecting.

Worldwide IT Spending on Pace to Grow 2.1 Percent in 2014 – Gartner

Worldwide IT spending is on pace to total $3.7 trillion in 2014, a 2.1 percent increase from last year, however, this grow rate is down from earlier projections of 3.2 percent growth.  The slower outlook for 2014 is attributed to a reduction in growth expectations for devices, data center systems and to some extent IT services.

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars)

IT services is forecast to total $967 billion in 2014, up 3.8 percent from 2013. Following weak vendor performance in 2013 across multiple geographies and segments, modestly improved spending is expected through 2014. IT outsourcing is growing slower than expected as sharply reduced pricing by the largest vendors is impacting the cloud storage services market. In addition, public cloud services are proving increasingly cannibalistic to more traditional data center outsourcing services. Implementation services are also growing slower than expected as risk-averse buyers remain focused on smaller, safer projects and some of the largest sellers remain focused on maintaining margins over growing revenue. 

In the enterprise software market, spending is on pace to total $321 billion, a 6.9 percent increase from 2013. Slightly increased growth expectations for infrastructure software are balanced out by slightly lower growth expected for applications software. Within infrastructure, the database management system (DBMS) software market is expected to have strong growth as DBMS adoption is driven by big data and digitalization initiatives. Slower growth is expected in the applications market, specifically office suites and digital content creation (DCC), which are being impacted by slow PC sales and the rapid move to cloud-based offerings by many organizations and professionals.

Source: Gartner

Big Data to Drive Software Market - IDC

The global software market is expected to grow 5.9% year over year, driven largely by Big data and analytics and enterprise applications.

Structured data management software, collaborative applications and data access, analysis and delivery solutions are expected to show the strongest growth in the next 5 years, growing at a CAGR near 9% from 2013-2018.

Leveraging the social dimension of the Internet keeps fueling the collaboration growth, much of which is in the form of software as a service. This is complementary to the increased attention to Big Data and analytics solutions, which help enterprises understand and act on anticipated customer behavior and new insights into product reliability and maintenance. 

In the enterprise applications category, customer relationship management, enterprise resource management, supply chain management, and operations and manufacturing applications will continue to show CAGR rates around 6%.

Enterprises are starting to adopt applications that either didn't exist or weren’t needed in the past, such as commerce applications in all industries, not just retail, but also manufacturing, hospitality, food and beverage, and even the public sector.

On a regional basis, the emerging economies will continue to see stronger growth than the mature economies. The average 2013-2018 CAGR for Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), Latin America, and Central Eastern, Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) is 8.5% while the average CAGR for the mature regions – North America, Western Europe, and Japan will be nearly 6%.

Source: IDC, InformationWeek

Indian Public Cloud Services Market to Total $557 mn in 2014 - Gartner

The public cloud services market in India is on pace to grow 32.2 percent in 2014 to total $556.8 million, an increase from 2013 revenue of $421 million. 

Spending on software as a service (SaaS) will total $220 million in 2014, growing 33.2 percent from last year.

SaaS is the largest overall cloud market segment, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS), totaling $78 million and business process as a service (BPaaS), totaling $75 million.

Growth of cloud services in India reflects the demand for new sourcing models. High growth rates are expected across all cloud services market segments in India.

BPaaS is expected to grow from $62.3 million in 2013 to $204 million in 2018. SaaS is expected to grow from $166 million in 2013 to $636 million in 2018, and IaaS is forecast to grow from $58 million in 2013 to $317 million in 2018.

The total cloud market in India in 2013 was $421 million, and the total market for public cloud services in India is expected to reach $1.7 billion in 2018.

Source: Gartner, Inc, Intec Systems

IT infrastructure spending in India to reach $1.9 billion in 2014 – Gartner

The Indian IT infrastructure market, comprising of server, storage and networking equipment, will total $1.9 billion in 2014, a 4 percent increase from 2013.

The global IT infrastructure investment is expected to be almost flat in 2014 and will be primarily driven by hyper scale and data center modernization initiatives. In the global landscape, India is a promising IT Infrastructure market through 2017.

Indian IT infrastructure is poised to be a US$2.35 billion market by 2017. After sluggish market conditions in 2013, the Indian infrastructure market will witness investments primarily fuelled by key IT initiatives that include mobility, cloud and big data.

Indian enterprises will be focusing on building intelligent data centers that focus on optimizing existing hardware assets by using additional software capabilities. This will drive increased attention on newer trends such as public cloud, and integrated systems. Within the Indian IT infrastructure market, server revenue is forecast to reach US$663 million in 2014, a 1 percent decline from 2013. The server market is expected to return to positive growth in 2015 when revenue is forecast to total $697 million.

Enterprise networking is the biggest segment with revenue expected to touch US$887 million in 2014. Data center consolidation and virtualization along with cloud and mobility are the key trends influencing network purchases. There is great potential for both users and vendors to leverage some of the emerging technologies to be ready for the future.

The storage market is on pace to reach US$384 million this year, an 11 percent increase from last year. Storage modernization and consolidation, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery are some of the key drivers to this market, and they are likely to remain relevant drivers over the forecast period through 2017.

Source: CIOL

India’s Top 10 Technology Trends in 2014 - Gartner

The top 10 strategic technology trends for Indian companies in 2014 include:

Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics

The BI, analytics and performance management segment is the hottest software market in India, fueled by IT prioritization and expanding business buying centers. A competitive business environment and economic conditions are also forcing enterprises in India to focus on using fact based decision-making tools to rationalize costs and time for businesses. Enterprises in India will continue to use BI to be transformative in their approach.

Mobility Solutions

Mobility in enterprise has created a huge opportunity for IT leaders to reduce costs, increase productivity and enable smooth business transactions. Swift growth in the prevalence of mobile devices, a decline in their price, and falling data plan costs have the potential to completely transform some business models. Organizations in India are beginning to leverage more personal interactions with greater reach and are also looking to evaluate mobile platforms as a delivery mechanism to provide an integrated view of multiple proprietary and publicly available datasets to help drive better real-time decisions.

Cloud Computing

Although still in its infancy in India and other emerging markets, cloud adoption is increasing. Led by infrastructure-as-a-service engagements in the data center, disaster recovery and storage areas, there is a broad range of providers that target large organizations as well as SMBs. This fast growing adoption by a diverse range of organizations has catalyzed providers to invest in high quality data centers and innovative cloud infrastructures, as well as a portfolio of cloud-related offerings such as security, communications and managed services.

Social Media and Computing

Social media in India has seen exponential growth in the recent past with enterprises using it for customer support and customers using it to offer opinions. A growing number of enterprises used social media to connect with their customers and for marketing campaigns in 2013 and social media is playing a pivotal role in Indian politics with the government and political parties increasingly using it to connect with citizens. Much of this growth can be attributed to increasing Internet penetration - which reached 198 million users (including mobile) as of June 2013 - making India one of the three most connected countries in the world.

Machine to Machine (M2M)

The M2M market in India is in a nascent stage but growing rapidly. Indian enterprises driven by demands to improve agility and productivity are evaluating the use of M2M-enabled solutions. Among the early adopters are verticals like utilities, automotive, financial services and transport, with other like healthcare and manufacturing following closely. The success of these projects is expected to result in broad-based deployments of M2M as an integral component of workflow automation.

Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD)

In India, server-based computing, which is also referred as "hosted shared desktop" or "terminal services," is seeing more adoption. More than 80 percent of desktop virtualization implementations are based on HVD. Organizations are only looking at desktop virtualization from the point of cost requirement, and they overlook other benefits such as full data backup, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) support, extended hardware life cycles, security, compliance and anytime-anywhere access.

Personal Cloud

Adoption of cloud computing in India is currently limited to the private cloud. Organizations are focused on protecting their applications located in enterprise app stores, as well as the content on employees' personal devices used at work. Tablets are becoming the first-choice user device and this form factor's explosion is creating device ubiquity. Users are creating their own personal digital ecosystems with their own sets of apps, games and media. Content is starting to shift to the cloud but, in the future, the cloud will become the primary storage for personal content, and local versions of the content will exist only as staged or cached elements.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

In its early phase of development, enterprises are experimenting with the IoT across a range of sectors, applications, business models and technologies in an attempt to unlock its value. The IoT delivers tangible value to enterprises through the ability to better utilize remote assets and creates business cases in three key areas - operational technology (OT), digital supply chain and customer interaction.

Collaboration Technologies

Collaboration technologies (otherwise known as workflow management or team collaboration) consist broadly of - real-time electronic meetings, content delivery, desktop and application sharing, text chat, group document markup with electronic whiteboarding, security and remote control. More advanced features include integrated voice over IP, file sharing, videoconferencing, content archiving, media streaming, feedback and polling. Real-time collaboration technologies not included in the Web conferencing category include instant messaging and stand-alone audio conferencing.

3D Printing

In India interest levels in 3D printing are slowly picking up and this is reflected in the increased presence of providers in the 3D printing space. Because of the country's large population base, high volumes and low cost requirements, 3D printing is expected to take off rapidly and revolutionize industries as diverse as aerospace, consumer goods, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and the military. 3D printing has the potential to radically transform design, manufacturing and the supply chain model in India.

Source: Gartner

BYOD: Enterprise Challenges

Bring your own device, or BYOD, is a disruptive phenomenon where employees bring non-company IT into the organization and demand to be connected to everything – without proper accountability or oversight.

The rising demand for anytime, anywhere connectivity and the increasing affordability of IT devices is giving way to new trends like BYOD (Bring your own device). Employees are now willing to buy their own IT gadgets and use them to remain connected to their workplace.

But experts warn that in the absence of proper accountability and monitoring these devices could a number of other concerns for the organization.  Through 2014, employee-owned devices will be compromised by malware at more than double the rate of corporate-owned devices.

The three BYOD challenges for enterprises are - 

Governance & Compliance

BYOD could lead to violation of rules, regulations, trust, intellectual property and other critical business obligations. Gartner suggests that instead of restricting or completely withholding support for employees’ devices, companies can identify 3-5 devices/variants that the organization is equipped to handle. The organization also needs to pre-plan and prepare itself for any possible risks such as data leaks or mishandling of sensitive information. A detailed guideline could be worked out to control and monitor access rights of employees.

Mobile Device Management

Organizations need to manage growing workforce expectations around mobility. Employees may use many devices and they expect to use any device or application anytime, anywhere. But workforce demands for mobility should not outpace the ability of the enterprise to handle them. IT managers need to find a balance between user expectations and the costs involved in managing such devices.

Security

This remains the biggest concern of enterprises while allowing employees to use their own devices. If left unmanaged, BYOD can lead to loss of control, impact the network availability, and cause data loss. Enterprises need the right network access strategies and policies in place to secure your environment.

While IT managers may find their own ways to deal with the above issues, it is equally important to motivate employees to comply with enterprise policies to improve the odds of BYOD policy compliance.

Source:  Gartner & CXO Today