The global market for business intelligence (BI) software services will roughly double over the next four years, from $76 billion in 2012 to $143 billion in 2016, according to new research from market watcher Pringle & Company.
Tom Pringle, the company’s principal analyst, says this growth is being driven by the universal applicability of business intelligence systems.
"BI is essentially about influencing the key levers of business performance, revenues expansion, cost control and profit, all in the context of managing risk," Pringle told Information Age. "Those four elements are relevant to all organisations."
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Around two thirds of BI-related spend goes towards services such as consulting, development and integration, Pringle & Company found. Services spend will grow from $54.5 billion in 2012 to $96.9 billion by 2016, it predicted.
It also found that analytics – the use of statistical analysis to interrogate data – is the fastest-growing component of BI. The market for analytics software is growing by 19% annually, compared to 16% for the BI market as a whole.
Pringle reminded practitioners that for BI systems to deliver value, the data that they consume must be of a high quality.
"You can have the best analysis tool in the world, but you would need a level of quality in the data that you use in that analysis, which is the biggest challenge for a lot of organisations," he says. "Quality data is at the heart of producing quality insight. Even worse than producing poor quality insight, poor quality data could produce misleading results."
