Worldwide business intelligence (BI) software revenue is expected to reach $17.1bn by 2016, according to Gartner.
Gartner expects BI software revenues to grow 7% to reach $13.8bn in 2013, up from $12.9bn in 2012.
The research firm said BI market growth will likely remain in the high single digits in coming years, due to sluggish macroeconomic indicators as well as slowing sales cycles of multimillion-dollar end-to-end BI deals.
Gartner principal research analyst, Dan Sommer said: "BI and analytics have grown to become the fourth-largest application software segment as end users continue to prioritize BI and information-centric projects and spending to improve decision making and analysis."
"As more and more information is generated, business models need reinvention, and it’s increasingly clear that mastering analytics on big data will be a key driver for the next economic cycle," Sommer said.
Gartner said CIO appetite for BI is complemented by more-tactical buying in business units for departmental and workgroup analysis, as well as for personal BI.
Gartner research vice president, Kurt Schlegel, said: "Although this is a mature market and has been a top CIO priority for years, there is still a lot of unmet demand. Every company has numerous subject areas — such as HR, marketing, social and so on — that have yet to even start with BI and analytics.
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"The descriptive analytics have largely been completed for most large companies in traditional subject areas, such as finance and sales, but there is still a lot of growth expected for diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive deployments."
"Since many midsize enterprises have yet to even start their BI and analytic initiatives, we expect the market for BI and analytics platforms will remain one of the fastest-growing software markets."
Gartner said the emerging data-as-a-service trend could significantly grow the market for BI and analytics platforms.
According to Gartner, instead of buy traditional software tools to build analytic applications, organisations will increasingly subscribe to industry-specific data services that bundle a narrow set of data with BI and embedded analytic capabilities .
