Business intelligence (BI) software sales are on the rise and will reach $13.8 billion in 2013, a 7 percent increase from 2012, according to Gartner (NYSE: IT). Why are CIOs buying more business intelligence? We’ll reveal the answer, including why the market is expected to reach $17.1 billion by 2016.

According to Gartner, CIOs’ appetite for BI is coming from more tactical buying in business units for departmental and workgroup analysis. While the fundamental drivers of this appetite include cloud, mobile, social, and information, additional growth will be hampered by sluggish macro indicators. Additionally, Gartner predicted that 2013 and the coming years are expected to be slower, with growth in the high single digits. (BI saw 16 percent growth in 2011.)

Garter Research Vice President Kurt Schlegel said that the BI and analytics platforms market, however, will continue to grow. “The descriptive analytics have largely been completed for most large companies in traditional subject areas, such as finance and sales, but there is still a lot of growth expected for diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive deployments,” he said. “Since many midsize enterprises have yet to even start their BI and analytic initiatives, we expect the market for BI and analytics platforms will remain one of the fastest-growing software markets.”

The data-as-a-service trend, according to Gartner, could significantly grow the market for BI and analytics platforms. Through this model, organizations license software capabilities to build analytic applications. In the future, however, organizations increasingly will subscribe to industry-specific data services that bundle a narrow set of data with BI and analytic capabilities embedded.

Back in December 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. (NASDAQ:FORR) released its BI predictions for 2013, and Forrester predicted that BI will continue to grow and that there will be more demand for mobile access to BI tools.