Business intelligence provider MicroStrategy has reported a 6% decline in revenues for the first quarter of the financial year, down to $130.2 million, despite healthy demand in the BI market. 

The company's licenses sales for the quarter fell by 24% during the quarter, down to $28.4 million. This was counterbalanced by a 1% increase in support and other services revenue, up to $101.8 million. 

MicroStrategy made a $5.2 million loss during the quarter, compared to a $1.1 million profit in the same period of last year. 

The company's steep decline in license sales comes at at time when demand for BI software is relatively healthy, compared to the rest of the enterprise software market. Analyst company Gartner expects the worldwide BI market to grow by 7% to $13.8 billion in 2013. 

"Although this is a mature market and has been a top CIO priority for years, there is still a lot of unmet demand," said Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel, research vice president at Gartner, earlier this year. "Every company has numerous subject areas — such as HR, marketing, social and so on — that have yet to even start with BI and analytics."

Furthermore, MicroStrategy was listed as one of the "leaders" in Gartner's most recent BI and analytics Magic Quadrant. 

In the Magic Quadrant report, Gartner noted a decline in MicroStrategy's sales, although it could not identify any specific cause. "Changes in the sales management might be the issue that affected the company's performance, because it is difficult to establish a correlation with any other relevant fact that may be hurting MicroStrategy's position in the market," the analyst company wrote.

"If the assumption is correct, then we should see a rebound in results in 2013, and MicroStrategy's Ability to Execute in the Magic Quadrant will also recover."

Evidently, that has yet to happen.