As per Gartner’s forecast, worldwide business intelligence (BI) software revenue will reach $13.8 billion in 2013, a seven percent increase from 2012. The market is forecast to reach $17.1 billion by 2016.

"BI and analytics have grown to become the fourth-largest application software segment as end users continue to prioritize BI and information-centric projects and spending to improve decision making and analysis," said Dan Sommer, principal research analyst at Gartner. "As more and more information is generated, business models need reinvention, and it's increasingly clear that mastering analytics on big data will be a key driver for the next economic cycle, he added.

CIO appetite for BI is complemented by more-tactical buying in business units for departmental and workgroup analysis, as well as for personal BI, enabled by the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information). These are fundamental drivers. However, in the near term, growth will be hampered by sluggish macro indicators, as well as by slowing sales cycles of multimillion-dollar end-to-end BI deals. Compared with 2011 growth of 16 percent, 2013 and the coming years are expected to be slower, with growth in the high single digits.

"Although this is a mature market and has been a top CIO priority for years, there is still a lot of unmet demand. Every company has numerous subject areas--such as HR, marketing, social and so on--that have yet to even start with BI and analytics," said Kurt Schlegel, research vice president at Gartner. "The descriptive analytics have largely been completed for most large companies in traditional subject areas, such as finance and sales, but there is still a lot of growth expected for diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive deployments. Since many midsize enterprises have yet to even start their BI and analytic initiatives, we expect the market for BI and analytics platforms will remain one of the fastest-growing software markets."

The emerging data-as-a-service trend could significantly grow the market for BI and analytics platforms. Today, the business model is largely "build" driven in that organizations license software capabilities to build analytic applications. However, organizations increasingly will subscribe to industry-specific data services that bundle a narrow set of data with BI and analytic capabilities embedded. In time, most companies, regardless of their business model, will need to provide a data-as-a-service offering. Therefore, this trend has the potential to grow the market significantly as a range of vendors look to embed a BI and analytic platform provider's software capabilities into their data-as-a-service offerings.

Additional information and analysis on the BI software market will be discussed at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summits 2013 taking place February 25-26 in Sydney and March 18-20 in Grapevine, Texas. The Gartner BI Summit is specifically designed to drive organizations toward analytics excellence by exploring the latest trends in BI and analytics and examining how the two disciplines relate to one another. Gartner analysts will discuss how the Nexus of Forces will impact BI and analytics, and share best practices for developing and managing successful mobile BI, analytics and master data management initiatives.