BI software market to grow 9% in Malaysia, 7% globally: Gartner

• In Gartner survey, Malaysia had highest percentage of respondents planning to increase BI software spend
• In near term, global growth to be hampered by sluggish macro-indicators, and slowing sales cycles of multimillion-dollar deals

BUSINESS intelligence (BI) software revenue in Malaysia is forecast to reach RM114.5 million (US$37 million) in 2013, a 9% increase from 2012, according to Gartner Inc, compared with worldwide revenue reaching US$13.8 billion, a 7% increase.
 
The worldwide market is forecast to reach US$17.1 billion by 2016, Gartner said in a statement.
 
“According to a primary research survey of 415 IT leaders from organizations in Asia Pacific last year, Malaysia (51%) had the highest percentage of respondents that planned to increase their BI software spending,” said Yanna Dharmasthira, research director at Gartner.
 
“The primary objective for using BI is to improve decision making by putting information to better use. In the slow economy, tracking sales activity and customer data became important, given the business priority to better manage expenses, increase revenue, improve marketing capabilities and increase customer satisfaction,” he added.
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CIO (chief information officer) appetite for BI is complemented by more-tactical buying in business units for departmental and workgroup analysis, as well as for personal BI, enabled by the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information), Gartner said.
 
These are fundamental drivers, the analyst firm added. However, in the near term, growth will be hampered by sluggish macro-indicators, as well as by slowing sales cycles of multimillion-dollar end-to-end BI deals.
 
Compared with 2011 growth of 16%, 2013 and the coming years are expected to be slower, with growth in the high single digits.
 
"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," said Kurt Schlegel, research vice president at Gartner.
 
"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," he added.
 
The emerging data-as-a-service trend could significantly grow the market for BI and analytics platforms, Gartner said.

Today, the business model is largely ‘build’ driven in that organizations license software capabilities to build analytic applications. However, organizations increasingly will subscribe to industry-specific data services that bundle a narrow set of data with BI and analytic capabilities embedded.
 
In time, most companies, regardless of their business model, will need to provide a data-as-a-service offering. This trend thus has the potential to grow the market significantly as a range of vendors look to embed a BI and analytic platform provider's software capabilities into their data-as-a-service offerings, Gartner said.
 
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