I ran across a profile of Fred Balboni. He’s the guy in charge of IBM’s global analytics group which launched in April 2009.

At its launch, the Business Analytics and Optimization Practice had 4,000 people working in the group. Today, it has more than 8,000 consultants on staff.

Balboni says the analytics market is a bigger opportunity than the ERP business. And that business has traditionally been a whopper.

“We always knew that it would be big, but the second we started to see the market respond to it we poured more resources into it.” Balboni says he suspects the practice can grow at 9 percent annually until at least 2015.

It’s not  too surprising to hear this from an IBM executive. Last week, IBM announced its intent to buy Algorithmics for  $387 million. According to Bloomberg, IBM has spent approximately $14.0 billion in acquiring analytics companies.  Algorithmics is the company’s 26th analytics acquisition over the last five years.

Services Angle

Does this seem plausible? I think it’s obvious. Yes, the analytics market will surpass ERP. Collaboration, sales forecasting, contact management – all have an analytics component. And as my colleague Klint Finley pointed out:

Every company needs to have the components of ERP (HR, financials, etc.) but not every company needs to have ERP per se. Every company needs some sort of analytics.

The challenge will be people. There is a huge shortage of people with analytics talent. And with IBM in play – my guess is that the battles to come will be for people with the analytics know how to provide the services that will be increasingly needed in organizations of all sizes.

Thoughts?