The number of data sources analysed by companies is set to jump by 83% in the next five years.

The growth is being fostered by increased access to data for employees as they look to apply analytics across the organisation.

Research findings point to the value of increasing the use of analytics. High-performing teams were shown to be two times more likely than underperformers to have more than half of the employee base using analytics tools.

In addition to this, high performing organisations analyse more than double the different types of data compared to underperformers.

As data analytics continues to prove its worth, organisations increasingly desire real-time, mobile insights and are placing a premium on ease of use, self-service capabilities and mobile when evaluating tools.

According to the study by Salesforce Research, high-performing organisations are five times more likely than underperformers to believe that mobile capabilities and data sharing are critical requirements of an analytics tool.

The need to drive operational efficiencies and to facilitate growth was pointed out as being the top two reasons for using analytics.

Additionally, there is an increasing desire to use analytics to automate business operations, to predict customer behaviour and to explore new business models.

The research surveyed more than 2,000 global business leaders, which identified whether they were high performing or underperforming, with high performing identified as those that rated their business performance as being much stronger than their competition.