Worldwide business intelligence (BI), corporate performance management (CPM) and analytics applications/performance management software revenue totaled $13.1 billion in 2012, a 6.8 percent increase from 2011 revenue of $12.3 billion, according to Gartner, Inc.

Tough macroconditions and confusion related to emerging technology terms led to more muted market growth than in previous years.

"After a few historic banner years of spend in the BI software market, which culminated in more than 17 percent growth in 2011, growth was more subdued in 2012, at seven percent," said Dan Sommer, principal research analyst at Gartner. "While this seems like a dramatic drop, it was in line with our forecasts published during 2012."

Gartner identified five key market dynamics that affected BI software spend and growth in 2012.

The first two of these — challenging macronomics and term confusion around "analytics," "big data" and "BI" — had a negative impact on market growth while the third — BI spending moving outside of IT, causing the semantic layer to go into maintenance mode — had a neutral effect. However, the fourth and fifth dynamics — data discovery becoming a mainstream architecture and software as a service (SaaS), while still emerging, being the preferred option for granular analytics — were drivers of market growth.

While all five of the top five BI software vendors retained their top five status, IBM and SAS exchanged places to move IBM into third position and SAS into fourth.

IBM grew 9.9 percent in 2012, with revenue of $1.6 billion.

The top five vendors together accounted for 70 percent of the total BI software market revenue.

In first place, SAP once again had significantly higher revenue than any other vendor at $2.9 billion with 22.1 percent of the market, although this was up by just 0.6 percent from 2011.

Second-place Oracle's revenue grew by 2.0 percent from 2011 to reach $1.9 billion.

Fifth-place Microsoft enjoyed the highest growth of the top five vendors in 2012, with revenue rising by 12.2 percent compared with 2011, to reach $1.2 billion.

"The business intelligence space managed to grow by a reasonable seven percent in 2012, despite difficult macroconditions, being on the tail end of a spending cycle, and confusion related to emerging technology terms causing a hold on purse strings," says Sommer.

"On the positive side, data discovery became a mainstream architecture in 2012 and the vendors built on this paradigm gained market share, while most semantically layered BI platforms grew in the single digits, at best. Cloud-based buying is also starting to make an imprint on the radar, showing substantial growth, although cloud still accounts for a smaller portion of the BI market compared with other application markets."