IDC defines the business analytics software market as comprising performance management (PM) tools and applications and data warehouse (DW) platform software for accessing, transforming, storing, analyzing, modeling, delivering, and tracking information to enable fact based decision making and extend accountability by providing all decision makers with the right information at the right time using the right technology.
The Business Intelligence ((BI) is an important growing sector of the enterprise software space. Using numbers from IDC, BI Tools represent a $7.8 billion opportunity in 2008, growing at almost 12 percent per year. The overall market opportunity for BI software and services is expected to be $30.6 billion for 2008.
The demand for predictive analytics technology has increased dramatically in the last several years. Moreover, the need for advanced predictive analytics to analyze data in multiple remote locations has significantly increased due to the heightened security concerns after the events of September 11, 2001 and the proliferation of databases across the intelligence community and federal agencies.
