Indian BI software revenue to reach $150 mn; advanced analytics gains traction

Indian business intelligence (BI) software revenue is forecast to reach $150 million in 2015, a 15 percent increase over 2014 revenue of $133.8 million, according to Gartner.

“The BI and analytics market is undergoing significant change. The development of mobile, information, cloud and social media technologies has disrupted the market and shifted it toward self-service, cloud and analytics applications tailored for business users and information workers,” said Bhavish Sood, research director, Gartner.

The BI platforms segment continues to lead the BI software market in India, as BI platforms revenue is forecast to reach $92.7 billion in 2015. All segments of the BI software market are expected to experience double-digit growth this year, the research firm said.

“We see signs of the emerging importance of BI in India as senior executives are increasingly exploring the different styles of analytics to resolve their business imperatives,” said Sood.

“There is an increased emphasis on metrics management and the growing use of performance management. Early big data use cases have started emerging and have executive visibility. This is leading to more investments in BI and information management.”

Two major trends are further shaping the BI and analytics market. One is the inexorable move to the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS); the other is the widening of access to analytics.

“More than half of the employees in many organisations now have access to BI. The buying of analytics is becoming influenced by business departments.”

Indian enterprises adopting BI have the advantage of benefiting from earlier adopters in developed markets, rather than needing to build their approaches from the ground up. In order to increase adoption, enterprises should evaluate data discovery, geospatial and mobile based approaches.

Market leaders

Mega vendors like SAS, IBM Oracle, and SAP may have been controlling 65-70% of the total BI market; niche companies like Tableau and Qlik are actually growing at much faster rate. Tableau may have just 2% market share but their growth rate is 80-90%, and same goes with Qlik , said Sood.

He also highlighted that in coming years Hadoop is going to be the underlying architecture, and will come as part of the analytics package.