Not over the next 5 years!
"Forrester" highlights the drivers that will prune this number back.
- Commoditization & consolidation multiple technologies
- Mergers, acquisitions, sales assets and outright failures
- Embedded BI subsuming agile BI
Commoditization & Consolidation
Once it was enough to be a world class specialist vendor e.g. :-
- Location Analytics
- Data Discovery
- Data Visualisation
- Enterprise reporting and querying
- Predictive analytics
Now, customers expect this all on in the one product
Mergers, acquisitions, outright failure
Infor purchasing Birst is a recent sign of this.
See "Sign of the Analytics Times?"
ERP, CRM, Enterprise Apps & Platform Vendors will consume many independent BI vendors and some will wither on the vine
Embedded BI subsuming agile BI
Agile BI finds it hard to scale to enterprise-wide BI. There is no time for information workers to search for new insights from new internal, external and unstructured data sources.
They need contextual insights which means in the context of the apps they use hour-by-hour, day-by-day.
For that to succeed information workers need to be presented with relevant, timely insights AND be empowered to make & execute decisions. That makes "write-back" an essential benefit of any analytics technology.
Those vendors without best of breed embedding and write-back will find it hard to be in the survivors.
Might be a good time to read the "BI Vendors Measure up against Gartner 2017 BI MQ & Critical Capabilities Reports" report.
Also read "Analytics vendors besieged on all sides"
Which ones do you think will survive independently or be acquired?
In the next five to 10 years, most independent BI vendors will likely get absorbed by industry behemoths, retool into industry -- vertical -- or business-domain-specific solutions, or go out of business. Companies should invest in deeper evaluation of emerging technologies or allocate their time wisely to other initiatives rather than spin their wheels selecting a BI platform that they base on table-stakes features.