With the usual caveats, about prediction being an inexact science, and “the value of shares can go down, as well as up”…

To Date:

 Almost two-thirds of 720 companies surveyed by Gartner last year said they were funding Big Data gathering and analysis projects, or planned to, by the end of 2013.

 A.T. Kearney forecasts global spending on Big Data hardware, software and services will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 30% through 2018, reaching a total market of $114bn. The average business is expected to spend $8m on related initiatives this year.

 The high level of interest and hype surrounding analytics, Big Data and business intelligence (BI) has led to a proliferation of market projections and forecasts.

 

Advanced and Predictive Analytics (APA)

Simplified APA tools (less flexible than standalone statistical models, yet with more intuitive graphical user interfaces and easier-to-use features) are fuelling adoption. The APA software market is projected to grow from $2.2bn in 2013 to $3.4bn in 2018, attaining a 9.9% CAGR in the forecast period. 

 Market leaders as of 2013 were SAS ($768.3m , 35.4% market share), IBM ($370.3m, 17.1%) and Microsoft ($64.9m, 3%).

 Source: IDC

 

Cloud-based Business Intelligence

 Redwood Capital’s recent Sector Report splits the BI market into traditional, mobile, cloud, and social business intelligence.

Overall it’s projected to grow from $.75bn in 2013 to $2.94bn in 2018, attaining a CAGR of 31%.

 According to Forrester’s latest Wave analysis of BI platforms, SAP, IBM, SAS, Microsoft, Oracle, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, and Actuate are market leaders in BI. 

 IDC predicts that cloud infrastructure will be the fastest-growing sub-segment of the Big Data market, with a 2013-2017 CAGR of close to 50%.

 

Big Data-related Hardware, Software and Professional Services

 Signals and Systems Telecom forecasts the market will reach $30bn in 2014, attaining a CAGR of 17% over the next 6 years. Big Data will be a $76bn market by 2020. 

 According to Wikkbon (“Big Data Vendor Revenue and Market Forecast 2013-2017”), Big Data is projected to be a $28.5bn market in 2014, growing to $50.1bn in 2015.

 Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR Technologies, Pivotal Software, and Teradata are Big Data Hadoop market leaders, according to Forrester’s latest Wave analysis of Hadoop Solutions. 

 

High Performance Data Analysis (HPDA)

 HPDA is a term IDC created to describe the formative market for big data workloads using HPC.

 IDC forecasts the server market for HPDA will grow at a 23.5% CAGR, reaching $2.7bn by 2018. The 2018 related storage market is projected to expand to $1.6bn.

 

Big Data Technology and Services

 Globally, revenue is expected to grow from $14.26bn in 2014 to $23.76bn in 2016, attaining a compound annual growth rate of 18.55%. 

 

Financial Services

 Bain & Company’s Insights Analysis, “Big Data: The Organisational Challenge” predicts that financial services firms will spend $6.4bn in Big Data-related hardware, software and services in 2015, growing at a CAGR of 22% through 2020. Software and Internet-related businesses are projected to spend $2.8bn in 2015, growing at a CAGR of 26% through 2020. 

 

Big Data Adoption

 Infrastructure (servers, storage, etc.) is the largest and fastest growing segment at 45% of the market, with services at 29% and software at 24%.

 The International Institute of Analytics (IIA) has predicted that companies will want to see demonstrable value in 2014, and will focus on embedding Big Data analytics in business processes to drive process improvements.

 

Human Resources

 The perceived shortage of analytics and data science talent has led IIA to make three separate but related predictions:

 1. The adoption of analytics-as-a-service will accelerate, with “ready-made analytics in the cloud” offering an attractive option for quickly testing Big Data analytics or scaling up existing programs.

 2. Increasingly, companies will organise teams of the analysts and data scientists they currently have on board, either embedded into business units or in centres of excellence. The focus will be on making these teams more effective, by establishing and sharing best practices. Their ultimate goal will be to attain levels of proficiency on a par with financial services institutions.

 3. The growth of tertiary education courses, to help alleviate the talent shortage. There are currently well over 100 schemes at universities in the US focusing on analytics and data science – still not enough, though. IIA predicts that companies providing Big Data analytics services will fill the gap in the interim, with the professional services market exceeding $4.5 billion in 2014.

 The number of vendors providing such services will triple over the next three years, according to IDC. As a knock-on effect, these firms will “aggressively acquire scarce Big Data talent,” making it even scarcer.

 

Expanding Markets

IDC predicts an expansion of the services part of the market to include “value added content providers,” i.e.:

• Traditional vendors” like Thompson, LexisNexis, and Experian

• New wave vendors” such as DataSift, Gnip, and LinkedIn

• Company and personal information vendors” like Acxiom, Equifax, and Tarsus, and

• Search engine/aggregators” like Yahoo, Google, and Salesforce/Data.com.

 

Statistics were aggregated from Louis Columbus and Forbes.