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