Despite the credit crunch, business intelligence (BI) software revenue reached $8.8 billion in 2008, a 21.7% increase from 2007 revenue of $7.2 billion, according to global research firm Gartner.
“Industry consolidation has led to an increase in growth, despite the necessary product rationalisations and organisational changes,” says Dan Sommer, senior research analyst at Gartner.
“The large stack vendors, especially the application vendors, have put a lot of focus and sales power behind their newly acquired BI products, with accelerated migrations and upgrades in the installed base as a result.”
Sommer points out that the high demand for BI stems from its cost-saving benefits driven by analytics and performance management.
“However,” he adds, “we don^1t expect these two markets to sustain the same high growth rate in 2009, as much of it came from the lowest-hanging fruit in up-selling products of an acquired company to an existing installed base and because the first half of 2009 was softer due to the recession.”
Following SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, Gartner says SAP was the number one vendor in combined worldwide BI, analytics and performance management software revenue in 2008. SAP accounts for 24% of the market, followed by SAS Institute and Oracle, each holding 14.6%, IBM, with 11.3%, Microsoft (7.7%), and Microstrategy (3.2%).
According to Gartner, both the BI platform and the analytic applications and performance management areas performed strongly with growth rates of 20.4% and 24.3%, respectively.
Related stories:
PC sales hold their own
Planning for the upturn
Is your organisation really ready?
Share