"Industry consolidation has led to an increase in growth, despite the necessary product rationalisations and organisational changes," said Dan Sommer, senior research analyst at Gartner. "The large stack vendors, especially the application vendors, have put a lot of focus and sales power behind their newly acquired BI products, with accelerated migrations and upgrades in the installed base as a result."
Following SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, the company was the No. 1 vendor in combined worldwide BI, analytics and performance management software revenue in 2008, accounting for 24 per cent of the market (see Table 1), followed by SAS Institute, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
"Most, but not all, of the midtier independent BI vendors targeting businesses struggled more, which indicates that there is bifurcation in buying to either more stack-centric behaviour, or smaller tactical departmental projects," Mr Sommer said.
"In tough times, the first step is to increase transparency which helps identify cost-centres, and then to more tightly align strategy with execution," Mr Sommer said. "This is why demand for BI, analytics and performance management is relatively strong even in a bearish economy. However, we don't expect these two markets to sustain the same high growth rate in 2009, as much of it came from the lowest-hanging fruit in up-selling products of an acquired company to an existing installed base and because the first half of 2009 was softer due to the recession."
Additional detail is available in the Gartner report "Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide 2008." The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/....