Business analytics is expected to reach 50% of potential users by 2014, according to a new report from Gartner.
The latest report suggests the IT to continue create foundations that would boost the importance of business intelligence (BI) and analytics in reinventing business models.
Gartner also said that analytics has largely been about IT projects until now, while the domination of digital technologies, referred as the Nexus of Forces, will influence CIO technology priorities, increasing the influence of analytics.
Gartner principal research analyst Dan Sommer said that by 2020, analytics is expected to reach 75%of users, and the world would then have systems of record, systems of differentiation and systems of innovation that enable IT, business and individuals to analyse data in a much denser fashion than before.
"Post 2020 we’ll be heading toward 100 percent of potential users and into the realms of the Internet of Everything," Sommer said.
However, factors including ease of use, performance and relevance are anticipated to discourage the constant adoption of BI and analytics by its intended users.
"One segment that is really pushing usability to new levels is what we call interactive visualisation or data discovery," Sommer said.
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"These are tools with appealing user interfaces, where you can mash data up, often into memory.
"This segment grows three times faster than traditional BI front-ends, and is expected to reach $1 billion in value by the end of next year."
Interactive visualisation segment is expected to be dominated by newer vendors including QlikTech, Spotfire and Tableau, while MicroStrategy, IBM, Microsoft and SAS have launched rivalling products in 2012, boosting the overall segment into a newer phase.
According to the research firm, the transformation from build, to buy has been another evolving area of relevance, or context, with several tools that assist to deal with the specific needs of businesses, including workforce analytics for the HR manager, or fraud analytics for the risk manager, or churn, for the telecommunications firm.
Further, the segment is opening up to involve several vendors including SAS, Oracle and FICO to service providers including IBM, Accenture and Deloitte.
Regardless of the ongoing consolidation and acquisitions by the mega-vendors, new kind of analytic applications are projected to continue to emerge, as the innovation keeps coming from small vendors in the fringes, which further results in market fragmentation.
In addition, Gartner analysts said that the categories of analytic applications have been consolidating and are been modified within each category, as vendors have been acquired or merged, while certain categories have been disappearing upon being superseded or integrated into other categories.
