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Teradata captured the sixth largest market share with a solid portfolio in data warehouse management, along with tools for data mining and analytic applications for supporting customer relationship management and supply chain management processes.

FICO's seventh position was driven by a heavy reliance on the financial services industry. In addition, the company, formerly Fair Isaac, leads the services operations analytics applications segment, and providesCRM analytics applications and advanced analytics tools.

Informatica had the highest growth rate of the top 10 vendors in 2008. Its presence in the market is due to its data integration software used for data warehouse generation.

Infor's ninth position is due primarily to a portfolio of analytic applications led by its financial performance and strategy management applications. The company also offers its own query, reporting, and analysis tools.

MicroStrategy rounds out the top 10 vendors. The company derives all its revenue in the market from the query, reporting, and analysis market segment.

The top 10 vendors account for 66% of the software revenue from business analytics, leaving the remaining 34% a competitive battleground for hundreds of independent software vendors worldwide.

"Some provide a single tool or application, while others offer software that spans multiple market segments," IDC said. "Some of these vendors are highly focused on specific business processes and/or industries, while others offer horizontal technology applicable across the market."

Vendors 11 through 35 in IDC's rankings are led in size by SPSS, Omniture, Integraph, Information Builders, ESRI and Sybase. However, in terms of momentum, the leading vendors are Netezza, QlikTech, Salesforce.com, Omniture, Sybase, and TIBCO.

Looking ahead, IDC believes incremental business analytics projects will dominate in the short term, as budgets are likely to be available only for narrowly defined projects with predictable returns on investment.

Broad, organization-wide projects are likely going to be rare in the short term," IDC said. "There will likely be more, lower-priced, department-level deals across all segments of the business analytics market."

IDC also expects end-user organizations to place a greater focus on cost containment, customer retention and service, risk management and compliance processes. In addition, there will be an acceleration toward software-as-a-service sales delivery model, and interest in open-source technology will continue to rise, particularly in the BI tools segment of the market.

In the intermediate to long term, end-user organization are likely to show interest in "areas of intersection of business analytics technologies with related solutions of collaboration, unstructured content access and analysis, business process management, and knowledge management,"IDC said.

The IDC's market analysis report is called the "Worldwide Business Analytics Software 2009-2013 Forecast and 2008 Vendors Shares," and it's available through the firm's Web site.