Australian BI spending hit $527m in 2013

Australian organisations spent $526.8 million on business intelligence (BI) and analytics software in 2013, up 9.5% from 2012, research firm Gartner estimates.

The global market for the software, which includes BI platforms - corporate performance management suites and analytics applications - grew 8% to around $15.5 billion (US$14.4 billion).

But a number of factors are serving to hold back market growth, Gartner said, including a challenging macroeconomic environment, confusion over how best to leverage analytics on big data and the trend towards flat IT budgets.

SAP again led the global market by a significant margin during the year, with an estimated 5.1% increase in sales to US$3.1 billion. The vendor’s market share increased to 21.3%. Second-placed Oracle took a 13.9% share of the market with sales of US$1.99 billion.

Microsoft meanwhile was the fastest-growing of the top five vendors during the year, with revenue rising 15.9% to US$1.4 billion and its market share increasing to 9.6%.

Gartner Research Director Dan Sommer predicted that the market will be influenced by a series of tipping points this year.

“These tipping points are that half of BI and analytics spend will be business driven, half of new licence spend will be driven by data discovery requirements and half of organisations will consider deploying BI in the cloud, at least tactically,” he said.

Despite the market’s single-digit global growth rate, Sommer said BI will remain a top priority for businesses in the years ahead.

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