IDC names BI market share leaders, predicts consolidation |
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By Barney Beal, News Editor
27 Jul 2006 | SearchCRM.com |
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IDC released its latest report on the market share leaders for BI technology Wednesday, and once again Business Objects SA tops the list, though SAS Institute Inc. is gaining ground.
Business Objects, with dual headquarters in Paris and San Jose, Calif., had the biggest portion of the market in 2005 with a 13.9% share, according to IDC. It is followed by SAS at 10.2% and Cognos Inc. at 9.9%. Microsoft, which had a 6.2% share, grew the fastest from 2004 to 2005 by adding an additional 25.5% in license and maintenance.
The Framingham, Mass.-based research firm placed the worldwide market for license and maintenance of BI, defined as analytic and query reporting and analysis tools, at $5.7 billion in 2005, a growth of 11.5%.
The top vendors are also seeing increased competition from database providers like Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle Corp., which increased its market share last year to 4.3%. With its acquisition of Siebel, Oracle is making the CRM vendor's analytics package the centerpiece of its BI portfolio moving forward. Oracle clearly increased it marketing efforts in BI in 2005 and will continue at above-market growth rates in the sector for the next 15 years, according to the report.
Last year was a turning point for the market, IDC says in the report, as it was the start of a new wave of investment in BI. Until 2020, companies will continue to purchase BI with the aim of expanding its reach to more users both inside and outside the organization. To answer this demand, BI vendors will continue to develop BI for the masses, or casual users of the technology, a departure from BI's traditional focus on power users of the technology and delivering information to analysts and managers. In fact, IDC says the market for reporting and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools has reached maturity and cannot sustain growth rates, and large IT vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM are targeting the market.
This next wave of BI will be driven by several factors, according to the report. Compliance; competitive pressures that demand not just measuring of a company's performance but delivering information in context; and connecting partners, suppliers and customers will all fuel investment, the report says.
The growth of the market is also requiring technology to become more scalable as the audience for BI grows. IDC research found that more than 40% of organizations surveyed revealed that if their BI systems go down for just a few hours, there will be a significant material impact on operations.
Additionally, enterprise search and data mining is emerging as a key trend as companies seek to derive value from unstructured information across the organization. Search technology has the potential to displace traditional BI tools in certain ad hoc and information retrieval use cases, the report says.
Open source has crept into the market over the last few years as vendors like Pentaho, JasperSoft and Actuate have carved out a niche, but IDC predicts the use of open source BI will be limited over the next five years because the BI market isn't large enough to support significant open source offerings.
This article originally appeared on SearchCRM.com.
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