Big Data hype, excitement driving business analytics boom
Following the 2008/09 global economic meltdown the business analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) industries rallied strongly. According to figures released by analyst firm IDC, worldwide business analytics revenues continued to climb quickly post-financial-crisis, posting 14.1% year-over-year growth in 2011.
IDC predicts that this trend will continue throughout 2012 and the near future, estimating a 9.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), reaching $35.1 billion in 2012 and $50.7 billion by 2016.
In a recent report announcing the latest prediction, IDC said that the sustained high-growth interest in the industry could be explained by “media attention focused on Big Data, putting broader business analytics on the agenda of more senior executives.”
IDC program Vice President, Dan Vesset, echoed those sentiments.
“Driven by the attention-grabbing headlines for Big Data and more than three decades of evolutionary and revolutionary developments in technology and best practices, the business analytics software market has crossed the chasm into the mainstream mass market.”
Business analytics and Big Data boom exposing skills shortage
Vesset went on to add that unprecedented demand within the worldwide business analytics software market was also exposing a “previously minor issue of the shortage of highly skilled IT and analytics staff.”
Good things come in threes
Of the three primary segments of the worldwide business analytics software market, the data warehousing platform software segment grew the fastest in 2011 at 15.2% year-over-year, followed by the analytic applications segment, which grew at 13.3%, and the BI and analytic tools segment, which grew at 13.2%.
What’s it all mean?
The IDC said that the unrelenting market growth would pose a number of challenges to the reporting and analytics community, with vendors having to devote increasingly large amounts of time to supporting growing numbers of less analytics-savvy organizations. IDC also suggested that a proliferating number of vendors and solutions, coupled with burgeoning demand, would lead to the fragmentation and niche-ification of the business analytics marketplace, with many more industry and process-specific tools offered.