Gartner is forecasting solid growth in the business intelligence and analytics software spend locally in the coming year, with the New Zealand and Australian markets both forecast to see growth in excess of the global average as businesses seek accessibility, agility and deeper analytical insight.

The new forecast from Gartner shows the BI and analytics software market is expected to hit US$18.3 billion this year, up 7.3% on last year's figures, expanding more rapidly than the overall market.

However, revenue growth locally exceeds that, with Gartner forecasting an 8.1% increase to NZ$113.5 million in New Zealand and a 13.4% increase for Australia, where the market will high AU$889.1 million.

While the growth remains solid – and is forecast to grow to US$22.8 billion by 2020 –  Gartner notes that the market is decelerating, from 63.6% growth in 2015, to a projected 19% growth by 2020.

Gartner says this reflects data and analytics becoming mainstream. “The market is growing in terms of seat expansion, but revenue will be dampened by pricing pressure,” the analyst firm says.

Rita Sallam, Gartner research vice president, says purchasing decisions are being influenced heavily by business executives and users who want more agility and the option for small personal and departmental deployments to prove success.

“Enterprise-friendly buying models have become more critical to successful deployments,” Sallam says.

The company says data preparation, cloud BI and analytics platforms are among the areas attracting investment.

“Business users want to analyse a diverse, often large and more complex combination of data sources and data models, faster than ever before,” Gartner notes.

“The ability to rapidly prepare, clean, enrich and find trusted datasets in a more automated way becomes an important enabler of expanded use.

On the cloud front, Gartner says cloud deployments of BI and analytics have the potential to reduce cost of ownership and speed time to deployment and interest in them will continue to grow.

While demand for enterprise data to reside on-premises remains high, Gartner says it is abating, with the company forecasting that the majority of new licensing buying likely to be for cloud deployments by 2020.

Smart data discovery capabilities, machine learning and automation of the entire analytics workflow will drive a new flurry of buying because of the potential value to reduce time to insights from advanced analytics and drive them to a broader set of people across an enterprise.

The use of more automated tools, or the embedding of analytics in applications – or a combination of both – will also be key drivers of expanded use and value, Gartner says, with support for real-time events and streaming data also expanding use.

Gartner says while business users initially flocked to new modern tools because they could be used without IT assistance, an increased need for governance will serve as the catalyst for renewed IT engagement.

“Modern BI tools that support greater accessibility, agility and analytical insight at the enterprise level will dominate new purchases,” Gartner says.

Meanwhile, marketplaces will create new opportunities to buy and sell analytics capabilities and speed time to insight, with buyers and sellers converging to exchange analytic applications, aggregated data sources, custom visualisations and algorithms in a move Gartner expects will generate increased interest in BI and analytics and fuel future growth.