Big data spending to reach $114 billion in 2018

Global spending on big data by organizations will exceed $31 billion in 2013, finds a new market forecast by ABI Research.

The spending will grow at a CAGR of 29.6% over the next five years, reaching $114 billion in 2018. The forecast includes the money spent on internal salaries, professional services, technology services, internal hardware, and internal software.

Senior analyst Aapo Markkanen comments, “We estimate that in big data initiatives salaries account for about half of the current spending, with the other half allocated to vendors’ products and services. What we’re now seeing is quite significant overspending on salaries, as organizations turn to data scientists and other specialists in order to leverage big data in the first place. Similarly, a good share of the money is spent on the associated professional services, which have sprung up to assist firms that are data-rich but skills-poor.”

Narrowing the said skills gap, as well as improving the productivity of dedicated data scientists, represents a lucrative revenue opportunity for the sector’s vendors. Cloudera’s Impala project, the hitherto readiest attempt to enable SQL on Hadoop clusters, is an example of this demand being addressed on the database front. Going forward, ABI Research expects significant innovation, especially from the field of analytics.

Practice director Dan Shey highlights, “Machine learning and its application in advanced analytics is one area that will make both the public and private sectors data-savvier than anything we’ve seen so far. Big players such as IBM and HP are understandably moving to this direction, but at the same time we can also see analytics startups, like Ayasdi and Skytree, that have machine learning in their very DNA. Eventually, such innovations will put analytics within any domain expert’s reach. At that point, data will stop being “big’ again.”