"BI, analytics and PM have been identified as one way to filter vast and growing amounts of information to reach insights and decisions in the digitised world, which is transforming industry after industry," said Dan Sommer, principal analyst at Gartner.

"The strong growth was driven by two major forces. The first is that IT continues to spend and earmark money to BI, despite constrained budgetary environments. Gartner's 2012 CIO survey showed that analytics and BI is the No. 1 technology priority for CIOs in 2012. BI projects remain relatively shielded, while a healthy portion of any discretionary money will be available for upcoming analytic initiatives," Mr Sommer said. "Second, new buying centres are opening and expanding outside of IT, in line-of-business initiatives, and taking an increasingly large stake of the spending pie. Key drivers for this are self-service data discovery tools, the race among vendors to provide business context through packaged analytics, and CFOs taking a renewed interest in BI and PM."

The top five vendors continue to consolidate the market through a combination of acquisition, integration and upsell/cross-selling activities with their stacks, resulting in them owning close to three quarters of the market. However, Gartner has identified more than 100 innovative vendors jostling for positions, some of them in hyper-growth mode. So, in no way is this a market with closed opportunities.

SAP remained the No. 1 vendor in combined worldwide BI, analytics and PM software revenue in 2011, accounting for 24 per cent of the market (see Table 1), followed by Oracle, SAS Institute, IBM and Microsoft.

All three subsegments of the market showed fairly even growth (see Table 2 below).
"This goes to show that clients prefer a balanced approach to sourcing, across a portfolio of technologies, rather than focusing on just one subsegment," said Mr Sommer. "It's not a build or buy decision; it's both."

"In 2011, the market is still dominated by traditional on-premises solutions linked to PCs," said Mr Sommer. “However, key forces like cloud, mobile, social and big data will play a key role in increased adoption over the next 10 years, and help shift the centre of gravity away from BI and analytics being only an enterprise IT push adopted by key stake-holders in lines of business, to one with a strong focus on the individual context, inside and outside the firewall. In 10 years time, everyone will be touched by analytics in a much denser and more frequent way than today."

Additional details are available in the Gartner report "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2011." The report is available on Gartner's web site at www.gartner.com/resId=1969315

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