As more CIOs implement analytics in an effort to become more operationally efficient, global business intelligence (BI) platform, analytic applications and performance management (PM) software revenue reached $12.2 billion in 2011, according to the latest findings from Gartner (News - Alert).

The BI, analytics and PM software market – the second-fastest growing sector in the overall worldwide enterprise software market in 2011 – showed a 16.4 percent increase from 2010 revenue of $10.5 billion, according to IT research firm.

“BI, analytics and PM have been identified as one way to filter vast and growing amounts of information to reach insights and decisions in the digitized world, which is transforming industry after industry,” said Dan Sommer, principal analyst at Gartner.

Growth was driven by two major factors: The first is that despite budget constraints, IT continues to spend and earmark money to BI. Gartner’s 2012 CIO survey showed that analytics and BI is the No. 1 technology priority for CIOs in 2012.

“BI projects remain relatively shielded, while a healthy portion of any discretionary money will be available for upcoming analytic initiatives,” Sommer said.

The second driving force is a renewed interest in BI and performance management through the use of self-service data discovery tools.

“New buying centers are opening and expanding outside of IT, in line-of-business initiatives, and taking an increasingly large stake of the spending pie. Key drivers for this are self-service data discovery tools, the race among vendors to provide business context through packaged analytics, and CFOs taking a renewed interest in BI and performance management,” Sommer added.

SAP (News - Alert) remained the No. 1 vendor in combined worldwide BI, analytics and PM software revenue in 2011, accounting for 24 percent of the market, followed by Oracle, SAS Institute, IBM and Microsoft (News - Alert).

The top five vendors own close to three quarters of the market, however, Gartner has identified more than 100 innovative vendors jostling for positions, some of them in “hyper-growth” mode.

“This goes to show that clients prefer a balanced approach to sourcing, across a portfolio of technologies, rather than focusing on just one subsegment,” added Sommer. “It’s not a build or buy decision; it’s both.”

While the market in 2011 was dominated by traditional on-premises solutions linked to PCs, forces like cloud, mobile, social and big data will play a pivotal role in increased adoption over the next 10 years, Sommer said, helping shift BI and analytics as an enterprise-only IT push to one with a focus on the individual context, inside and outside the firewall.

“In 10 years time, everyone will be touched by analytics in a much denser and more frequent way than today,” Sommer said.