--- title: Gartner Forecasts Significant Growth in Prescriptive Analytics description: This blog post summarizes the major take-homes from Gartner's Forecast Snapshot of Prescriptive Analytics Worldwide for 2015. image: https://download.riverlogic.com/hubfs/Blog_Images/gartner_forecasts_significant_growth_in_prescriptive_analytics.jpg --- ### Get in Touch [![logo](https://download.riverlogic.com/hs-fs/hubfs/logo.png?width=3153&height=398&name=logo.png "logo")](http://riverlogic.com) [![logo-hover](https://download.riverlogic.com/hs-fs/hubfs/logo-hover.png?width=3153&height=398&name=logo-hover.png "logo-hover")](http://riverlogic.com) - [Solutions](http://www.riverlogic.com/solutions) - [Capacity Planning](https://download.riverlogic.com/solutions/capacity-planning) - [Commodity Trading & Logistics](https://download.riverlogic.com/solutions/commodity-trading-and-logistics-optimization) - [Product Mix & Customer Profitability](https://download.riverlogic.com/solutions/product-mix-customer-profitability) - 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While prescriptive analytics — i.e. optimization or linear programming — has been around since the late 1940s, it hasn’t generated significant adoption. It's been very difficult to implement, requiring months or years of effort by highly experienced practitioners.  However, **this is beginning to change as firms place more emphasis on data science/decision analysis** as a result of vendors investing to make their platforms available to business users.  **Gartner analysts have identified the following four trends as primary factors in driving growth:**  1. **Massive investments in predictive analytics.** Oftentimes, firms invest in these capabilities to develop better forecasting and make a better return on their data, but they soon realize that these tools don’t provide all the answers. Nevertheless, the outputs of predictive anlaytics provide valuable inputs for prescriptive analytics to recommend courses of action based on forecasts. 2. **Expansion of key use cases.** We see more and more use cases in areas such as logistics or supply chain, where the value is already proven and a broader section of large firms are now adopting the capabilities. Newer use cases are only likely to impact the latter years in the forecast. 3. **Internet of Things (IoT) vendors will look to add prescriptive analytics to their offerings.** As all kinds of machines begin to generate data at an ever-increasing frequency — usually in the form of alerts and rudimentary predictions — customers are increasingly asking the question "what do we do with all that information?"  Again, prescriptive analytics is an excellent complement to IoT capabilities to dramatically increase the ROI from these investments. 4. **Vendor capability enhancements lead to expansion of the user base within organizations.** Proper adoption and maximum value from prescriptive analytics only ensues when the capabilities are deployed across all relevant functions/business units such that the quality of inputs, collaboration around analysis, and implementation are fully embedded into business process. This means broader user bases. Broader user bases are already being facilitated by vendors providing new capabilities for business users to access the power of prescriptive analytics. ### Closing Thoughts on Gartner's Prescriptive Forecast It's certainly encouraging to see the evolution of Gartner’s coverage of prescriptive analytics, further indicating that the market continues to grow.  Gartner analyst Lisa Kart published the first Gartner piece on prescriptive back in May of 2015 — it focused on educating end users on the value of prescriptive and how to begin adopting prescriptive analytics.  She followed with another piece in the same month that provided an overview of the vendor landscape.  Since then, there have been numerous Gartner publications on the topic (not to mention search volume has skyrocketed over the last few years).   Here at River Logic, we've seen our own "boom" in demand for / interest in prescriptive analytics. Our clients and partners continue to see its value, pushing more and more user adoption of our prescriptive-based planning software. Gartner's forecast is just further evidence that business leaders are becoming more aware of the immense value prescriptive analytics adoption can bring to enterprises and mid-sized corporations. 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