2014 US growth forecasts of Business Intelligence vendors

There are many ways of measuring the growth of business intelligence vendors. One approach of interest in the era of self-service analytics is to measure the growth in web search volume. Derived from web search volume data from Google, the following analyses can serve as a useful reference to understand which companies/products are growing in popularity and which may be falling out of favor.

The estimates in all of the following analyses are based on simple web search volume indices from the United States through the end of November, 2013. Using historic search volume data, forecasts were built for each company/product and growth rates for 2014 were derived from these forecasts.

I would group these companies into three categories
fast growers- Tableau, PowerPivot, Qlikview, BIRST and GoodData;
the growers- Spotfire and Microstrategy,
and mature products- Oracle BI, SAS, Cognos, SPSS, SQL Server, Actuate and Business Objects.

Only a few companies have accelerating growth forecasts in 2014- upstarts BIRST and GoodData and established BI leader Microstrategy.

Also of interest, the companies/products most strongly associated with advanced analytics, data mining and forecasting are all in the red. This may be attributed to several factors- pricing, the rise of R, Python and free tools like RapidMiner and the rise of visual analytics as a partial substitute to advance analytic projects.

In the next graph, you can review the history and future forecast by month of the 7 growing companies in web search volume, based on year-over-year growth in 2013 over 2012. Tableau, Qlikview, PowerPivot, BIRST, Spotfire, GoodData and Microstrategy

 
 
 
The remainder of the field, the stalwarts of analytics and BI, include Oracle BI, SPSS by IBM, Cognos by IBM, SAS, SQL Server, Actuate and Business Objects from SAP.

 
 
 
Combining all of the growing business intelligence/visual analytics vendors except for Tableau, and then comparing them with Tableau based on the search index volume, yields a fascinating view of this space. Tableau is bigger in search volume than the next 6 companies combined. I expect this may begin to change as awareness of products like Microstrategy Analytics Desktop, BIRST Visual Discovery, Qlik’s latest release and Spotfire’s broad vision of analytics is heard by analytics and IT leaders.

 
 
 
For those who appreciate the data in simple tables, check out the whole history in the highlight tables below.

All data and forecasts in this analysis are based solely on public data sources.