Revenue for business intelligence (BI), corporate performance management (CPM) and analytics applications increased 6.8% between 2011 and 2012, according to Gartner.
The growth, which took revenue up to $13.1 billion in 2012, was more muted than in previous years, caused by difficult macroconditions and confusion about terminology related to emerging technology, says Gartner.
"After a few historic banner years of spend in the BI software market, which culminated in more than 17% growth in 2011, growth was more subdued in 2012, at 7%," says Dan Sommer, principal research analyst at Gartner. "While this seems like a dramatic drop, it was in line with our forecasts published during 2012."
The fact that data discovery is becoming a mainstream architecture was a driver of market growth, according to Gartner, countering the negative effect of the confusion around terms such as 'analytics', 'big data' and 'BI'.
Other market dynamics included software-as-a-service being the preferred option for granular analytics and BI spend moving outside of IT, which had a neutral effect.
The market was strongest in Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific, which displayed double-digit growth, while Europe and Latin America were more heavily affected by difficult macronomics.
The top five BI software vendors - SAP, Oracle, IBM, SAS and Microsoft - accounted for 70% of the total revenue. The rankings of the top five stayed mostly consistent, with only IBM and SAS exchanging places, due to IBM's growth of 9.9% in 2012, with revenue rising to $1.6 billion.
SAP leads the set by a considerable margin, holding 22.1% of the market, with $2.9 billion in revenue, although this represented only 0.6% growth from 2011. While Oracle, in second place, grew by only 2%, Microsoft reported the highest growth of any of the top five, at 12.2%, reaching $1.2 billion.
"The business intelligence space managed to grow by a reasonable 7% in 2012, despite difficult macroconditions, being on the tail-end of a spending cycle, and confusion related to emerging technology terms causing a hold on purse strings," notes Sommer.
"On the positive side, data discovery became a mainstream architecture in 2012 and the vendors built on this paradigm gained market share, while most semantically layered BI platforms grew in the single digits, at best. Cloud-based buying is also starting to make an imprint on the radar, showing substantial growth, although cloud still accounts for a smaller portion of the BI market compared with other application markets."
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