Business Intelligence (BI) has become a huge global market in the past 10 years due to its significant benefits to the businesses. Business intelligence is a collective effort through a number of tools, practices, and technology for providing insights and useful information for an informed decision making. However, BI is mainly managed through data-driven systems that are called Decision Support Systems (DSS). BI systems offer relevant insights by considering the historical, current, and predictive analysis of the business operations and related processes. The scope of work of business intelligence includes keeping track of business data, BI software, big data analysis, and more. BI positively affects a business organization in many ways including improved productivity, improved visibility, sorted over-watch, streamlined processes, and easy analytics.

The global BI market is huge and it is growing at a steady pace as more and more businesses are adopting the BI model. The current global business intelligence market is growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.6 percent and it is expected to maintain the growth rate till 2020. Similarly, the global BI market value is $18.3 billion which is estimated to reach $22.8 billion by 2020 as well. APAC is considered to be the next big market due to projected high market growth in the next 5 years whereas North America and Europe are high maturity markets. A personalized and self-service business, Data as a Service (DaaS), and big data analysis are some major growth drivers in the global BI market. With the help and advent of online platforms such as Cloud, mobile technology and social BI solutions, the market is also expanding in regions such as Japan, LATAM, and MEA.

BI Market Growth in the Past 5 Years:

Being a relatively newer business solution, the BI market has performed quite well in the global landscape. The market is highly mature in the regions such as North America and Europe, and with a high penetration as well. Although the APAC region has medium-level penetration, but the sector is expected to grow considerably in the coming years thanks to the emerging economies from developing countries. Here is a look at the growth in the global BI market in the past 5 years.

• The BREXIT has also impacted the global BI market by in large and the most affected sectors are IT service providers and buyers. This will impact the billing rates as talent crunch in specific skills for application development and maintenance will add to that. This is also because the UK technology startups employ a significant workforce from EU member states as it does not have sufficient talent pool to fill positions in sectors that concern BI industry in the respective sectors.

The same is the case with the SaaS service providers. The UK is one of the key destinations for data centers that serve local clients. However, the clients from European Union have to comply with even more stringent General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that will affect compliance costs.

• The BI market thrives on 4 critical elements such as data mining, statistical analysis and visualization, data warehouse/data Mart, data sources, etc. Being the most critical aspect of BI, the data holds utmost significance. According to market reports, the big data generated on a daily basis amounts approximately 2.4 Quintillion bytes. This amount is expected to reach 40 zettabytes by 2020. The industry focuses on analyzing such data for deriving meaningful insights. The focus remains on setting the right goals for data collection and analysis so that the objective of the services can be satisfied.

• The global BI industry gets some support from a variety of predictive tools and methods as well. The methods and analysis include graph analysis, business forecasting, and complex techniques for event processing for an improved and comprehensive decision making. The use of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology are also raging trends that are dominating the industry. These can also allow the key personnel in the organizations to raise analytical queries and get response promptly.

• Many factors work in favor of the global BI market but there are certain constraints as well. The industry has to face issues such as fluctuating digital ethics, data governance issues, and high implementation costs. Digital ethics that lead to data breach and theft may lead to serious losses for the organizations. The concern here is for cloud tools that often lack secure framework and there integration to third-party apps leads to potential breaches.

On the other hand, cloud services also lead to fragmented analytics which is not the case with centralized IT services. Such a situation leads to ineffective data management and governance as the suppliers have to focus on data auditing. The BI services are in high demand and they require complex programming as well. This results in high implementation cost which is a prominent constraint in the market.

The global business intelligence market is a niche market that caters to specific businesses. Although the market is witnessing more penetration in the emerging non-traditional markets, it still has a lot to accomplish in terms of the industry challenges.