Worldwide BI and Analytics Market to Reach $16.9 Billion in 2016: Gartner

Global revenue in the business intelligence (BI) and analytics market is forecast to reach $16.9 billion in 2016, an increase of 5.2 percent from 2015, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc.

According to Gartner, the BI and analytics market is in the final stages of a multiyear shift from IT-led, system-of-record reporting to business-led, self-service analytics. As a result, the modern business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) platform has emerged to meet new organizational requirements for accessibility, agility and deeper analytical insight.

"The shift to the modern BI and analytics platform has now reached a tipping point," said Ian Bertram, managing vice president at Gartner. "Organizations must transition to easy-to-use, fast and agile modern BI platforms to create business value from deeper insights into diverse data sources."

The democratization of analytics

Gartner says that as analytics has become increasingly strategic to most businesses and central to most business roles, every business is an analytics business, every business process is an analytics process and every person is an analytics user.

"It is no longer possible for chief marketing officers (CMOs) to be experts only in branding and ad placement," said Mr. Bertram. "They must also be customer analytics experts. The same is true for the chief HR, supply chain and financial roles in most industries."

To meet the time-to-insight demanded by today's competitive business environment, many organizations want to democratize analytics capabilities via self-service.

Defining the modern BI and analytics platform

The most significant difference between a modern BI and analytics platform and a traditional, IT-centric reporting and analysis platform is the amount of upfront modeling required, as well as the skills needed, to build analytics content (see Table 1). Creating analytics content via IT-centric reporting platforms starts with IT consolidating and modeling data in advance. By contrast, a modern BI&A platform supports IT-enabled development of analytics content.

Table 1: High-Level Comparison of Traditional and Modern BI and Analytics Platforms

Source: Gartner (December 2015)

"To get the full benefit of modern BI and analytics platforms, leaders must rethink most aspects of their current IT-centric, centralized analytics deployments, including technology, roles and responsibilities, organizational models, governance processes and leadership," said Mr. Bertram.