The Business Intelligence (BI) Software Market

With the global business intelligence (BI) market predicted to grow from $23.1 billion in 2020 to $33.3 billion by 2025, it is clear that businesses across the world recognize the value of business intelligence software. This is no surprise as the insights gained from BI data help businesses to make faster and more accurate decisions. 

Here, we will examine business intelligence software and its capabilities, the state of the market as it stands today and the growth trends being observed.

What is business intelligence (BI) software?

BI software facilitates analysis and planning in an organization. It helps a business to collect and process its data, so it can be used to help in the decision-making process.

Overall, BI software is useful in the following areas:

• Customer profiling

• Customer support

• Market research

• Market segmentation

• Product profitability

• Statistical analysis

• Inventory analysis

• Distribution analysis

This level of functionality is achieved with four main components:

• Online analytical processing: This allows for quick data analysis. These analyses can be done on large amounts of data.

• Corporate performance management: This aspect of BI software is useful for analyzing data from different parts of a business and using it to improve business operations. This component is helpful for budget forecasting, supply chain management and risk management.

• Data warehousing: Businesses can analyze data from several different sources, allowing for data comparison. This allows them to draw conclusions on how different parts of their organization affect each other. 

• Data mining: This is the process of unearthing patterns across large data sets. These patterns would have been otherwise hard to detect. 

• Real-time reporting: Organizations use this data to make decisions on the fly. This is important for situations that require immediate reaction.

BI software features

Here are some of the main features business intelligence software that you should be aware of:

• Platform security: While using data to produce useful analytics is important for business success, the data must also be kept safe. A strong business intelligence offering facilitates this with measures such as single sign-on (SSO) to standardize authentication policies in an organization.

• Metadata management: Metadata is the information that describes the data a company collects. It’s useful for identifying data. A good BI tool will effectively manage this, so users can easily retrieve the data they need.

• Highly visual dashboards: Dashboards that use rich graphics in the form of charts and graphs are easier to understand. Without this feature, generated reports could be ineffective, and users may have to resort to making their own BI visualizations.

• Mobile device support: Having access to BI software on a mobile device allows for more user flexibility. Users are able to check BI software at any time. This allows them to speed up their rate of making decisions.

• Manually manipulate data: Allowing users to choose which data they want to manually process gives them more flexibility in the results that they can obtain. This manipulation is usually done with a drag-and-drop interface. 

• Use predictive models: Businesses use BI software to find patterns that indicate a certain type of behavior. This allows them to react to market changes before they become more prevalent.

• Cloud BI tools: Companies get fast and easy access to the power of BI without locally installed software. The cloud makes it easy to scale up users, features and usage.

• Location intelligence: Users visualize data in a form that shows the geographical location associated with data. This can help with understanding parts of the business such as revenue in particular regions.

An employee reviews business metrics on dual monitors. Courtesy Adobe.

Benefits of BI software

Here are some of the major benefits that BI software offers:

• Higher customer satisfaction: BI software is used to help businesses see patterns. These include buying and customer feedback patterns. Analyzing these patterns helps businesses to improve the customer experience (CX). 

• Identify market trends: The trend-finding capabilities of BI software can help show where markets are going early on, giving businesses a competitive edge.

• Increased efficiency: Since BI software can collect and analyze data from multiple sources, information about business actions that need to be taken is processed relatively quickly. This gives users and leaders the information they need with less effort. 

• Better decisions: Businesses can make more accurate decisions based on the information gained from BI software. This is another way to gain a competitive edge.

• Lower expenses: BI tools help businesses develop better cost-saving strategies and show them the best areas to spend on or divert spending organization-wide. 

BI software use cases

These are a few different use cases that shed light on how BI software can be useful for enterprises:

Health care

EvergreenHealth, a health system based in Kirkland, Washington, used Diver BI software to help manage being one of the health systems in the U.S. to be severely impacted by COVID-19. They used their BI software to visualize lab test data in real-time. They also needed to relay information to the public. With the BI system, the hospital communications team had the information they needed readily available to communicate effectively.

Distribution

Georgia Crown Distribution, a beverage distributor based in McDonough, Georgia, has found several uses for their business intelligence software. They’ve used their platform to generate sales reports, forecast and plan systems and cut down the time to complete a quarterly budget from 10 days to two days. The distributor also reports that they’re finding new ways to optimize processes in their business. 

Live election results

Business intelligence technology can play a critical role in reporting on elections. For example, during the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial primary election, the Associated Press made use of Microsoft Power BI to provide live election results. On election night, they were able to provide up-to-date numbers using interactive charts and data visualizations.

Business intelligence market

With the BI market expected to grow from $23.1 billion in 2019 to $33.3 billion by 2025, it is a market to be watched. 

This expected growth is due to a number of factors: businesses focusing more on digitizing; rising amounts of investment in analytics technology; increasing demand for dashboards for data visualization; increasing numbers of people adopting the cloud; and increasing amounts of data to be sorted through. 

Several different industries make use of BI software, including:

• Retail

• Manufacturing

• Government and public services

• Media and entertainment

• Transportation and logistics

• Telecommunications

• Health care and life sciences

• Tourism and hospitality

• Banking, financial services and insurance

The health care and life sciences sectors have experienced seen BI growth due to the need for real-time insights from unstructured clinical data, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The banking, financial services and insurance sectors are expected to have the largest BI market share overall during the period from 2020-2025. This is due to those sectors’ need to get data from several different places, such as revenue departments, tax authorities and central banks. These sectors also desire to reduce risk, improve customer retention policies, improve marketing strategies and develop novel investment strategies.

North America holds the largest market size in terms of geography. However, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow at the highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2020-2025. The North American market is advanced when it comes to business management analytics, while countries such as China, Japan, and India are increasingly adopting BI programs.

There are also a few emerging trends in the BI market: establishing a data-driven culture; data governance; and self-service BI. These trends appear to be coming to the forefront, as companies realize they need to be able to manage their own data and make good use of it. Cloud BI is also becoming more prevalent due to the relative ease of deploying cloud solutions. 

BI software makers

These are some of the top makers of business intelligence software for enterprises: 

• IBM

• Oracle

• Microsoft

• SAP

• Google

• Salesforce

• Vphrase

• Amlgo Labs

• Yellofin

• Zoho

Final thoughts                                                                         

In today’s competitive business environment, having access to reliable business intelligence data helps businesses to make the best decisions. 

Business intelligence software helps businesses to see patterns and predict events before they even happen. 

Business intelligence can help important players in this sector to correct existing problems.

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William Elcock

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