No end in sight to the growth of cloud analytics

It's no secret that cloud computing and data analytics are both rapidly growing areas of IT. Put them together, and you get a winning combination that's expected to grow by more than 26 percent annually over the next five years.

That's according to market-tracking firm Research and Markets, which has released a new report on the global cloud analytics market.

Increased adoption of data analytics is one of the major drivers in this market, Research and Markets found. More specifically, many organisations are adopting data analytics in order to better understand consumption patterns, customer acquisition and various other factors believed to increase revenue, cut costs and boost customer loyalty.

HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are among the dominant vendors in this arena, the company said in a press release.

Big Data is one of the particularly significant trends in the market, Research and Markets said.

"Cloud analytics deals with the management of unorganised data, which helps organisations access important data and make timely decisions regarding their business," the company said.

The rates of growth in this arena might actually be much higher than those suggested by the report, said analyst Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research.

In fact, Constellation Research predicts an annual growth rate of closer to 46 percent until 2020, he said.

Early-arriving cloud companies like Salesforce "had great reporting, but they didn't necessarily have great analytics," Wang said.

It's for that reason that challengers such as Actuate have popped up, he noted.

"More and more, because of the size and complication, we're seeing analytics move to the cloud," Wang said.

"People are not spending money on data centers or data warehouses when they can just stick to Azure, Amazon Redshift and others," he said. "It's a very different game."