In one of its latest reports, research firm Gartner projects that the global market for analytics and business intelligence will only grow 7 percent this year. That’s a significant drop from the 16 percent that Gartner reported for 2011, when big data wasn’t creating nearly as much buzz as it does now.

Gartner expects that growth will remain single-digit for the next few years. According to the paper the BI market $14 billion in 2013, and $17 billion by 2016.

The firm blames the growth decline on a combination of weakening economic conditions and a decrease in the number of big-budget BI deals. This means that companies are favoring cheaper “tactical” buys of specialized, and often overlapping software, for individual departments.

“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. 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.”

Another factor for the slowing demand for BI software is the rise of hosted analytics solutions: Google BigQuery and Amazon Elastic MapReduce have become hugely popular in recent months.

Unlike business intelligence, the cloud services market is only accelerating. AWS is gaining so much traction in the enterprise that VMware’s COO had to make some bold statements at the company’s recent partner gathering in order to assure attendees that they can “beat a company that sells books”.