In the age of the customer, customer-obsessed firms serious about personalizing customer experience invest in business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools.  Companies collect more and more data on their clients today. BI software is increasingly important to extract information from the raw data, revealing insights. Analytics software tools go beyond traditional reporting and analysis to anticipate customer behavior and provide real-time insights.

In our recently published Business Intelligence And Analytics Software Forecast (Global), 2015 to 2020, we take a more in-depth look at the market’s growth potential. We expect the global BI and analytics software market to grow at a 12% CAGR over the 2015 to 2020 period.

The traditional BI market has matured, but still offers a significant growth opportunity. While business intelligence software is not a new product, Forrester projects robust growth for the solution. As we move into the Internet of Things era, an exponential increase in the number of connected devices will drive demand for BI software tools to understand the information. We expect the BI software market to grow at a 9% CAGR over the forecast period.

Advanced analytics are leading the pack. Forrester’s forecast examines both the predictive and streaming analytics software markets in detail. Once upon a time, predictive analytics modeling required an extensive background in econometrics and statistics. Today the packaged software does the heavy lifting (no PhD required!) to analyze and draw conclusions from data. This means a wide variety of folks (sales, marketing, finance) can do predictive modeling. Forrester expects this “consumerization” of analytic tools to help drive 12% annual growth in predictive analytics software. Streaming analytics software provides real-time information and analysis and we expect over 40% annual growth during the 2015 to 2020 forecast period .

If you have interest in the sector, be sure to check out the Forrester Wave evaluations by my colleagues Boris Evelson and Mike Gualtieri: The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q1 2015; The Forrester Wave: Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions, Q2 2015; The Forrester Wave: Big Data Streaming Analytics Platforms, Q3 2014.

To learn how our forecasts can help you with your investment decisions, read our ForecastView overview.