"Even though growth was nowhere near the levels of 2008, and by no means immune to the recession, BI showed that it is not as cyclical as many other software areas, recording healthy growth in one of the toughest years recorded in software history," said Dan Sommer, senior research analyst at Gartner. "The dominant vendors continued to put BI, analytics and PM front and centre of their messaging. Organisations largely continued their BI projects, hoping that resulting transparency and insight would enable costcuts and improved productivity and agility. However, there is no doubt pressure has intensified on deal sizes and price points on new sales throughout the year."
The top five vendors continued to make up most of the market with 71 per cent market share. "The large vendors held their own. As IT is consolidating, BI spending often went to a few strategic vendors. However, the applicationcentric vendors didn't have the same upselling momentum as they did in 2008," said Mr Sommer.
SAP was the No. 1 vendor in combined worldwide BI, analytics and PM software revenue in 2009, accounting for 22 per cent of the market (see Table 1), followed by Oracle, SAS Institute, IBM and Microsoft. Looking at the subsegments of BI, there were different market share leaders. In BI platforms, SAP continued to maintain the lead. In the area of corporate performance management (CPM), Oracle maintained its leadership with the former Hyperion portfolio, while SAS remained the leader in analytic applications and PM. In all three areas, IBM emerged as a strong challenger with its servicesled offering, showing above market growth and strengthening its positions during 2009. Microsoft also continued to gain users by embedding BI functionality in their wider Microsoft environments.
All three subsegments of BI showed growth. BI platforms showed slightly stronger growth than CPM suites and analytic applications and PM, excluding CPM (see Table 2).
"While IT is trying to rationalise around one or a few vendors, the market for selfservice BI is wide open. All vendors, small and large, onpremises, opensource or in the cloud, are flocking to cater for this space, trying to coexist with the enterprise standard" said Mr Sommer. "We see more buying from lineofbusiness, as dashboards and data discovery tools with inmemory analytics and easeofuse visualisation has made it an attractive and fastvalue proposition to bypass IT. The vendors in this segment, together with the opensource crowd, continue to be the fastest growers in the BI market."
Additional detail is available in the Gartner report "Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009" The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/....
Additional Information (tables): see attachment