​Global BI and analytics market tipped to hit $16.9b in 2016: Gartner

The global business intelligence (BI) and analytics market is forecast to reach $16.9 billion in 2016, an increase of 5.2 percent from 2015, according to Gartner.

In Australia, the BI and analytics market will reach AU$700.1 million, up 9.1 percent, while in New Zealand, revenue will reach NZ$92.3 million, an increase of 8.1 percent from 2015.

Gartner said CIOs in Australia and New Zealand ranked BI and analytics as their top technology priority for 2016 in a recent annual survey.

Gartner managing vice president Ian Bertram noted that as analytics have become increasingly important, businesses have been developing more modern BI platforms so that they are able to gain faster access to insights.

He further added that in order to help meet time-to-insight demand, organisations have started to democratise analytics by providing self-service capabilities through these new platforms. As a result, he said every person in the business is now an analytics user.

"It is no longer possible for chief marketing officers (CMOs) to be experts only in branding and ad placement," he said. "They must also be customer analytics experts. The same is true for the chief HR, supply chain, and financial roles in most industries."

Vendors such as IBM have realised the importance of the BI and analytics sector, and recently acquired IRIS Analytics, a company that applies real-time fraud analytics to combat payment fraud.

At the end of last year, Microsoft bought analytics firm Metanautix. At the time, Microsoft said it plans to integrate Metanautix's technology with SQL Server and the Cortana Analytics Suite.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services released a series of products last October to beef up its big data analytics suite.