The technology and service market around the big data trend is expected to grow at seven times the rate of the overall ICT market, according to a forecast from market watcher IDC.
Big data is the trend of taking large volumes of information and analysing them for business insights like improving operational efficiency, identifying customer spending habits or spotting potential new product opportunities.
The research firm believes the category was worth US$3.2bn in 2010 and it’s predicting more than 40pc compound annual growth to 2015. By then, the market is set to be worth close to €17bn, it claims.
IDC breaks down the category into a range of segments. Software and services comprise the bulk of the market opportunity between now and 2015, and infrastructure technology for big data deployments will also grow.
Given the large scale of information to be crunched, storage is unsurprisingly set to see the greatest growth (61.4pc). Software is anticipated to grow by 34.2pc and servers by 27.3pc.
The firm believes the growth in appliances, cloud computing and outsourcing deals for big data technology will mean that over time, end users will pay increasingly less attention to technology capabilities and will focus instead on the business value arguments.
System performance, availability, security and manageability will all matter greatly, according to IDC.
However, it also warns of a current shortage of people skilled in big data technology, and of analytics experts, which will inhibit adoption and use of big data technologies among end-user organisations. On the supplier side – which includes both established players and start-ups – this factor will encourage vendors to deliver big data capability through the cloud, IDC says.
