Analytics market growth slows as confusion remains over Big Data

The worldwide business intelligence (BI) and analytics software market decelerated in growth through 2013, according to new data from Gartner. The slowdown suggests not all businesses are clambering to purchase new tools for tackling Big Data, as some reports have recently predicted.

Spending across the globe totalled $14.4bn in 2013, which was an 8% increase on 2012 revenue of $13.3bn, but falls a few billion short of IDC’s prediction earlier this year.  

Gartner suggests that a lack of investment in emerging markets may have led to the lower than expected spend, and that “confusion still reigns around how to best leverage analytics on Big Data”.

Many organisations still view big data solutions as “experimental” at present, with a large proportion of investment in analytics solutions happening outside traditional BI within isolated silos, the analyst house confirmed.

IT budgets were also flattening, it confirmed, leading to some under-investment across regions. Dan Sommer, research director for Gartner, suggested this was a slight misnomer, as market trends suggested a surge in market growth through the next year as businesses realigned their interest in using data analytics:   

"Overall, just like last year, the market is shifting gears, which is keeping growth in the single digits. At the same time, paradoxically, we’re at the cusp of a series of tipping points which will facilitate unprecedented interest and adoption of analytics.”

SAP currently lead the revenue charts with a 21.3% market share in 2013 and $3.1bn revenue, however Microsoft enjoyed the largest growth, with revenue rising by 15.9% on 2012 to $1.4bn.

“As the market shifts gear, we see a series of tipping points in 2014 that will accelerate adoption, but it may come from a different place,” Sommer added. “These tipping points are that half of BI and analytics spend will be business driven, half of new license spend will be driven by data discovery requirements, and half of organisations will consider deploying BI in the Cloud, at least tactically.”

“Right now we’re in a trend of proliferating information sources, applications and buying. Those vendors, mainly outside the top five, that aligned themselves with this caught disproportionally higher interest and growth relative of market share for net new buying, albeit from smaller market footprints. To counter, the big vendors are expected to dramatically improve their stories around becoming more nimble with data discovery and Cloud this year and the next.

“Finally, analytics is also moving beyond just being a singular tool to become more omnipresent, embedded in various other applications and infrastructures. All of these trends, paradoxically to the single-digit growth, cement analytics as a top priority and will tip it to touch a much broader base, down to the personal analytics level.”