Business intelligence (BI) and analytics software revenue in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) totalled $245-million in 2014, a 12% increase from 2013 revenue of $219-million, according to Gartner.
The BI and analytics market consists of BI platforms, corporate performance management (CPM) suites, analytic applications and advanced analytics.
SAP continued to be the lead vendor in the region, achieving revenue of $61-million in 2014, a 3,6% increase from 2013 revenue. Tableau, Qlik and FICO also registered the strong growth in the region.
“The market share leaders who sell in a stack-like fashion with IT as the main target experienced low to flat growth,” says Joao Tapadinhas, research director at Gartner.
“Worldwide, there is a structural re-balancing going on, from on-premise to cloud, from traditional BI platforms to data discovery, and from perpetual pricing to subscription. As this plays out, overall growth will slow,” says Bhavish Sood, research director at Gartner.
“Although infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders in the Middle East show a lot of interest in public cloud, they stop short of adopting any cloud-based solution,” Sood says. “This impacts the migration towards cloud BI with latency, data security and privacy mentioned as major concerns by clients in the market. One of the main disadvantages for most countries in the MENA region, compared with mature markets and other emerging regions, such as Eastern Europe and Asia/Pacific, is the lack of a sizable pool of local IT skills, especially when it comes to analytics and big data.”
On a segment level, BI platforms showed a slow but steady shift in emphasis from reporting centric to analysis centric tools. Advanced analytics experienced strong growth, showing the increased focus organisations gave to predictive and prescriptive analytics.