According to Gartner, business intelligence (BI) and analytics software revenue in the Middle East and Africa (MENA) totaled $245 million in 2014, a 12 percent increase from 2013 revenue of $219 million.
The BI and analytics market consists of BI platforms, corporate performance management (CPM) suites, analytic applications and advanced analytics.
SAP continued to be the lead vendor in MENA, achieving revenue of $61 million in 2014 a 3.6 percent increase from 2013 revenue. Tableau, Qlik and FICO registered the strong growth in the MENA region.
Joao Tapadinhas, Research Director, Gartner, said, “The market share leaders who sell in a stack-like fashion with IT as the main target experienced low to flat growth.”
Bhavish Sood, Research Director, Gartner, said, “Worldwide, there is a structural re-balancing going on, from on-premise to cloud, from traditional BI platforms to data discovery, and from perpetual pricing to subscription. As this plays out, overall growth will slow.”
Table 1
Top 10 Business Intelligence and Analytics Software Vendors, Middle East and North Africa, 2013-2014 (Millions of Dollars)
| Vendor | 2013 | 2014 | Growth 2013 – 14 (%) |
| SAP | 59.0 | 61.1 | 3.6 |
| Oracle | 45.1 | 49.1 | 8.8 |
| SAS Institute | 29.9 | 32.3 | 7.9 |
| Microsoft | 18.0 | 19.6 | 8.9 |
| IBM | 9.1 | 11.7 | 28.7 |
| Qlik | 4.3 | 6.1 | 40.3 |
| Panorama Software | 4.7 | 5.1 | 8.1 |
| Tableau | 2.3 | 4.0 | 77.8 |
| Fico | 2.2 | 3.4 | 53.9 |
| Other Vendors | 78.2 | 92.9 | 18.7 |
| Total | 252.8 | 285.2 | 12.8 |
Source: Gartner (June 2015)
“Although infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders in the Middle East show a lot of interest in public cloud, they stop short of adopting any cloud-based solution,” said Sood. “This impacts the migration towards cloud BI with latency, data security and privacy mentioned as major concerns by clients in the market. One of the main disadvantages for most countries in the MENA region, compared with mature markets and other emerging regions, such as Eastern Europe and Asia/Pacific, is the lack of a sizable pool of local IT skills, especially when it comes to analytics and big data.”
On a segment level, BI platforms showed a slow but steady shift in emphasis from reporting centric to analysis centric tools. Advanced analytics experienced strong growth, showing the increased focus organisations gave to predictive and prescriptive analytics.
