Gartner ranks analytics/BI as the top technology for 2012. Forrester cites BI as the largest planned enterprise technology investment area over the next three years, and IDC predicts that the business analytics software market will hit $39.9 billion in 2012 (up 8.2% from 2011).
The promise of analytics/BI – better, faster decision making – is now very much a reality, and businesses not moving forward on the analytics/BI front will find themselves consumed, commoditized or simply crushed faster than what was even imaginable ten years ago.
To be sure, analytics/BI will continue its strong uptake in 2012 and beyond, but the nature of BI deployments is rapidly changing. Gone are the complex, costly, resource-intensive and IT-controlled BI deployments of the 80s and 90s.
To more fully deliver on its promise, today’s BI deployments must be driven by business users, include a wealth of intuitive, easy-to-use-tools, extend to mobile devices, and empower a greater number of business users to access, model and analyze data from across the enterprise without having to ask IT. Hence, the rise of self-service BI.
According to the “2012 Wisdom of the Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study” conducted by Dresner Advisory Services, over the past three years BI deployments have shifted away from IT-led deployments in favor of deployments led directly by line-of-business management and BI end users – accounting for roughly 54% of worldwide BI deployments.
In its 2011 Magic Quadrant report, Gartner notes that ‘ease of use’ is surpassing ‘functionality’ as the dominant criterion when deciding on a BI platform purchase. Gartner’s June 2011 report “The Consumerization of BI Drives Greater Adoption” states that the consumerization of BI – which is inextricable from self-service BI – is creating a new breed of end-user focused BI solutions that are easier to use, reach a greater number of business end users and deliver a better ROI.
Gartner claims that the shift toward self-service BI is “arguably the biggest shift in BI adoption since the rise of enterprise-class BI platforms in the late 1990s.”
In its 2012 “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligent Platforms,” Gatner picks up where it left off, stating that in 2011 “[…] business users continued to exert significant influence over BI decisions.”
In “The Forrester Wave: Self-Service Business Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2012,” Forrester reports that, due to IT’s inability to keep up with increasing requirements, “relying too heavily on
IT-centric BI support models is not sustainable.”
Moreover, Forrester maintains that “in an ideal BI environment, 80% of all BI requirements should be carried out by the business users themselves.”
The analytics/BI market shows no signs of slowing, and moving forward we can expect self-service BI to account for an increasing proportion of BI deployments.
According to Gartner, the worldwide business intelligence (BI) platform, analytic applications and performance management (PM) software revenue reached $12.2 billion in 2011, a 16.4 percent increase from the 2010 revenue of $10.5 billion. The BI, analytics and PM software market was the second-fastest growing sector in the overall worldwide enterprise software market in 2011, according to Gartner.
According to IDC, the global market for business analytics software grew roughly 14% in 2011, fueled by pervasive hype about “big data” as well as new technological innovations. Between now and 2016, the business analytics market will have a compound annual growth rate of 9.8%, reaching US $50.7 billion, IDC says.
