Gartner says Middle East and North Africa business intelligence software revenue on pace to grow 11% in 2013 and reach $182m

Gartner analysts are examining the key issues facing the BI market during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through Friday.

"With the increase in information generated, business models need reinvention, and it's increasingly clear that mastering analytics on big data sets will be a key driver for the next economic cycle," said Dan Sommer, principal research analyst at Gartner. "There is still a lot of mileage in the market, but most of it will come from opportunities outside of the IT-department. In the near-term, areas such as in-memory, data discovery and off-the-shelf analytics from software and service providers will drive the trend of business-focussed buying. Longer term, mobility, cloud, social and information will be channels to help unlock a whole new set of users and use-cases."

BI software revenue in MENA is projected to grow to $260m by the end of 2016. BI will remain one of the fastest growing software markets, despite sluggish economic growth in some regions, as organizations continue to turn to BI as a vital tool for smarter, more agile and efficient business.

"As Western Europe is overbought and Eastern Europe stutters, the larger software companies in EMEA are looking at the the Middle East region," Mr. Sommer said. "However, this is a region where the supplier landscape is closely tied to service providers, who also have a key role in vendor selection. The ability to connect to world-class skills is as important as the product."

Big Data

BI efforts flourish with large datasets. The larger the dataset, the easier it is to uncover hidden subtle patterns and trends and, therefore, opportunities that are likely to evade the competition. BI derived from big data is crucial to business competition and will depend on the evolution of BI competencies and data warehouse architectures.

"It's not just traditional BI performed on bigger datasets," said Mr. Sommer. "It also tackles data variety, velocity and complexity. The business requirement to conquer and mine big data is here to stay for most enterprises, and it will increasingly become a C-level priority."

Advanced analytics

While BI serves a distinct purpose for sharing, summarising and manually exploring data and metrics, more advanced analytics can aid and even automate decision-making. Pending a convergence of these capabilities, Gartner advises organizations to consider BI and advanced analytics distinctly from one another, recognizing the advantages and unique use cases of each.

The mainstream organizations are already moving from measuring and describing the past to analysing why things happen. The area of true differentiation will now be predicting what is likely to happen and optimizing what should happen based on an increasingly varied set of data sources and types. The addition of mobile, social and collaborative technologies to advanced analytics tools will give a broader set of users insight for decision making when and where they need it.

"Globally, only one in 10 organizations have mature programmes in place for predictive and prescriptive use-cases. The technology is already there. Lack of skills is the biggest bottleneck for achieving success," said Mr. Sommer

Gartner's forecast for BI software revenue is available in the report "Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2009-2016, 4Q12 Update.

Gartner analysts are examining key industry topics and providing insights at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.

Source: http://www.ameinfo.com/gartner-middle-east-north-africa-business-332494

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