Market Overview: The Business Intelligence Software Market

Business intelligence (BI) software is the tip of the application software pyramid. Pure functionality, no matter how sophisticated, is no longer sufficient to successfully support the changing business requirements of today. BI provides business guidance based on deep data analysis, which is even more important in economically challenging times. As such, the BI market is much less affected by the current economic crises than most other software markets and will continue to grow to $14 billion by 2014. New categories of advanced analytics will fuel the growth and merge into the core BI market, including business performance solutions, text analytics, predictive analytics, and complex event processing. Each of these market sectors will grow at its own pace and will converge over time into core BI as new sectors emerge. Success in each sector will require differing strategies, but opportunity for smaller, nimbler players is clearly there despite the recent surge of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity.