Big Data Market to Grow to $16.9 Billion by 2015

Market research firm IDC has released a new forecast that shows the big data market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. Big data is a new frontier in IT where data sets can grow so large that they become awkward to work with using traditional database management tools. Thus, the need for new and more tools, frameworks, hardware, software and services to handle this emerging issue represents a huge market opportunity. IDC projects that the increased investment needed to support big data represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent, or about seven times that of the overall information and communications technology (ICT) market. According to IBM, everyday business and consumer life creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day—so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: from sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transaction records of online purchases, and from cell phone GPS signals, to name a few. 

"The big data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and startups vie for customers and market share," Dan Vesset, program vice president for Business Analytics Solutions at IDC, said in a statement. "For technology buyers, opportunities exist to use big data technology to improve operational efficiency and to drive innovation. Use cases are already present across industries and geographic regions. Moreover, while the five-year CAGR for the worldwide market is expected to be nearly 40 percent, the growth of individual segments varies from 27.3 percent for servers and 34.2 percent for software to 61.4 percent for storage. "There are also big data opportunities for both large IT vendors and startups," Vesset said. "Major IT vendors are offering both database solutions and configurations supporting big data by evolving their own products as well as by acquisition. At the same time, more than half a billion dollars in venture capital has been invested in new big data technology." Additionally, IDC said the growth in appliances, cloud computing and outsourcing deals for big data technology will likely 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. However, how they are achieved will be less of a point for differentiation among vendors.