I know, I know, this is what analysts do. But I personally would never want to get involved in doing a BI market size – it’s open game for serious critique. Here are some of the reasons, but the main one is a good old “garbage in garbage out.” I am not aware of any BI market size study that took into account the following questions:

  • What portion of the DBMS market (DW, DBMS OLAP) do you attribute to BI?
  • What portion of the BPM market (BAM, process dashboards, etc.) do you attribute to BI?
  • What portion of the ERP market (with built-in BI apps, such as Lawson, Infor, etc.) do you attribute to BI?
  • What portion of the portal market (SharePoint is the best example) do you attribute to BI?
  • What portion of the search market (Endeca, Google Analytics, etc.) do you attribute to BI?
  • What is the market size of custom developed BI applications?
  • What is the market size of self built BI apps using Excel, Access, etc?
  • On the other side, what is the % of licenses sold that are shelfware and should not be counted?

Plus many more unknowns. But, if someone indeed did do such a rough estimate, my bet is that the actual BI market size is probably 3x to 4x larger than any current estimate.