BI and Analytics Market to Cross $18 Billion Mark in 2017

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Increased demand for better business insights will push the worldwide market for business intelligence (BI) and analytics software solutions to $18.3 billion this year, a 7.3 percent jump from 2016, said Gartner in new forecast today. In 2020, the market will expand to $22.8 billion, predicted the analyst firm.

Organizations are increasingly pursuing modern BI and analytics solutions that characterized by agility, deeper insights and improved accessibility, often in the form of self-service capabilities. As a consequence, business units are taking the reins from IT departments when it comes to purchasing BI products.

“Purchasing decisions continue to be influenced heavily by business executives and users who want more agility and the option for small personal and departmental deployments to prove success,” said research vice president Rita Sallam, in a statement. “Enterprise-friendly buying models have become more critical to successful deployments.”

But don’t count IT departments out.

Gartner predicts that while business users will gravitate to tools that don’t require IT involvement, governance requirements will bring IT back into the fold. Naturally, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the enterprise, and barrier-breaking providers that ride the wave, will have an impact on the market.

“Organizations will benefit from the many new and innovative vendors continuing to emerge, as well as significant investment in innovation from large vendors and venture capital-funded startups,” Sallam added. “They do, however, need to be careful to limit their technical debt that can occur when multiple stand-alone solutions that demonstrate business value quickly, turn into production deployments without adequate attention being paid to design, implementation and support,” she cautioned.

Add the Internet of Things (IoT) to the list of factors affecting the market.

Enterprises will seek solutions that support streaming data and real-time events to make sense of the deluge of data produced by IoT sensors and devices. And as they begin to incorporate data from different sources and models, businesses will also look for solutions that clean and prepare complex datasets in an automated manner.

Naturally, businesses will look for many of these capabilities in the cloud. Gartner predicts that by 2020, most BI and analytics software licensing activity will involve the cloud as organizations aim for speedier deployments, and of course, the cost-cutting benefits of shifting analytics workloads to the cloud.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.