Document storage could become more important as data analytics become increasingly popular.
Electronic document storage, online backup programmes and cloud systems are becoming more mainstream in the modern IT department and as such they are helping to drive the growth of business intelligence software.
In a current commercial environment that is hit by low consumer confidence, pessimistic business outlooks and a lack of lending, services that can set a company apart from its competitors for a relatively small investment are becoming highly sought after.
A new report from Gartner found that worldwide business intelligence (BI) software revenue will reach $13.8 billion (£8.94 billion) by the end of this year – a seven per cent increase from 2012.
Businesses may want to invest now, as the systems are here to stay, with Gartner predicting the BI market to reach $17.1 billion by 2016.
"BI and analytics have grown to become the fourth-largest application software segment as end users continue to prioritise BI and information-centric projects and spending to improve decision making and analysis," said Dan Sommer, principal research analyst at Gartner.
He explained that as more data and documents are generated by businesses, corporate IT and data storage models need reinvention and "it’s increasingly clear" that those who master the analytics of this big data will be more likely to be successful in the next economic cycle.
Gartner explained that the emerging data-as-a-service is likely to be behind the BI and analytics platforms surge in the future. This will mean that companies will move away from the "build" driven approach that many currently adopt to subscribe to industry-specific data services that offer the ability to process a narrow set of specific data with BI and analytic capabilities, which will be embedded.
Eventually, most companies will need to provide a data-as-a-service offering, said the research company.
"Although this is a mature market and has been a top CIO priority for years, there is still a lot of unmet demand. Every company has numerous subject areas – such as HR, marketing, social and so on – that have yet to even start with BI and analytics," added Kurt Schlegel, research vice president at Gartner.