The market for business intelligence (BI) platforms in Asia Pacific is expected to grow 7.4% to reach almost USD 1.4 billion in revenue in 2014 and more than USD 1.6 billion by 2017, as data discovery and mobility create a revival in spending by business users, according to Gartner.
The author of a new report on the competitive landscape for BI platforms in Asia Pacific, Gartner research director Bhavish Sood, said growing interest in big data solutions will continue to positively impact BI spending across Asia Pacific in 2014 and beyond.
"Information intensive initiatives are popular in organizations in Asia Pacific's accelerating economies, because information is a competitive differentiator," Sood said.
"We expect this to continue as organizations pursue regulatory compliance, performance management and overarching enterprise information management initiatives."
In Asia Pacific, the top four megavendors SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM controlled 72.2% of the BI platform market in 2012, up from 65% in 2011.
However, Gartner analysts said that business units increasingly prefer data discovery solutions, such as Tibco Spotfire, QlikTech and Tableau Software, while their counterparts in IT are still more comfortable procuring from megavendors.
"Given the current economic climate of slow growth, CIOs are looking for solutions that need minimum servicing and can deliver fast time to value. These demands are being met by packaged analytical applications, preconfigured BI appliances and intuitive data discovery tools," Sood said.
Australia will remain the region's biggest BI platform software market in the next few years, reaching USD 386.2 million (AD 372.9 million) in 2014 (up 5.4% over last year) and growing to USD 443.5 million in 2017. Growth in Australia's BI platform software market is driven by maintenance and new license revenue, with many clients in Australia looking at vendor consolidation as part of their overall BI competency center initiatives. As a developed market, Australia will maintain a more-stable revenue stream from existing maintenance revenue, despite fears of another economic downturn due to China and eurozone issues. The midmarket is also showing healthy signs of BI technology adoption.
In New Zealand, the BI market is expected to grow 5.6% to USD 50 million (NZD 61.7 million) in 2014 and USD 55.8 million in 2017. The local BI market will be sustained through maintenance revenue and BI investments made by government departments. New Zealand continues to be a test bed for the launch of major technologies in the Asia Pacific region because of its technology-savvy population.
China will remain the second-largest BI software market in Asia Pacific through 2017, reaching USD 217.3 million. Most often, BI solutions in China are used tactically in departmental deployments as a reporting tool, rather than as a strategic platform to build up analytic capabilities to support decision making. Chinese organizations' relatively low-level maturity of the demand and supply sides of IT and analytic professionals creates extra challenges for BI technology adoption in China.
According to Gartner research director Daniel Yuen, China will be the next battleground for vendor market share.
"In the past, due to cultural and market issues, many vendors hesitated before planning an entry into China. However, this is changing, and vendors are slowly waking up to the reality that China represents one of the largest custom development markets, and they are executing to grab market share there."
"Interest in big data has also spiked; however, confusion around the terms analytics, big data and BI have started to disrupt the Chinese market, and we expect this trend will result in slowing BI spending cycles in 2014," Yuen said.
Customers across the region are keen to harness the innovative capabilities of Hadoop. Most big data discussions tend to be mired in the technical capabilities of Hadoop, rather than focusing on the business problem or use case at hand. Because not many vendors in the region can offer both the technology and the business analytics capabilities, implementation issues are bound to arise. Most open governments, such as in Australia, promote the publication of great quantities of data in raw format in an effort to use data in meaningful ways for its citizens. This, along with smart city initiatives being promoted by several governments Hadoop; will be an important part of governments' information management strategy.
When it comes to advanced analytics, Asia Pacific organizations are willing to examine products from smaller niche companies that offer packaged analytical applications that solve a particular business pain point. This is possibly due to the scarcity of skill sets in the market and the pressure on IT from business folks to deploy BI. As a result, clients are open to buying packaged analytical applications to address specific pain points and niche problems. One clear distinction is that, unlike platform sellers, these vendors predominantly sell to business buyers.
