Revenue from business intelligence software to hit US$132.2 million in Singapore

Driven by the growth of the cloud, mobile, social, and information trends, the business intelligence (BI) software sector in Singapore is expected to grow by 8.7 per cent to US$132.2 million this year.

This is despite the fact that the technology has been a top priority for IT leaders for years, according to research firm Gartner.

“There is still a lot of unmet demand,” said Kurt Schlegel, a research vice president at Gartner, in a release sent to media last week. “Every company has numerous subject areas – such as HR, marketing, social and so on – that have yet to even start with BI and analytics.”

This is largely due to the explosion in information on the Internet. This so-called “big data” is large and complex, and mastering it for analysis, such as to spot trends and improve decision-making, is considered to be a key competitive edge.

Gartner predicts that firms will increasingly subscribe to industry-specific data services instead of licensing software to build their own analytic applications, contributing the the market’s expansion.

On the global scale, the BI market is forecast to grow to US$13.8 billion in 2013, a 7 per cent increase from last year, and reaching a total of US$17.1 billion by 2016.