Study: Big Data spending to reach $114B by 2018, driven largely by salaries
ABI Research states that global spending on 'Big Data' by organizations will exceed $31 billion in 2013. The firm's new study further projects spending in the market to 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.
“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," reveals ABI senior analyst Aapo Markkanen.
He continues, "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, reports ABI. For example, Cloudera’s Impala project -- hitherto, the readiest attempt to enable SQL on Hadoop clusters -- is an example of this demand being addressed on the database front, says the firm.
Going forward, ABI Research expects significant innovation in the market for Big Data, especially in the field of analytics.
ABI practice director Dan Shey adds, “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.”
The findings are from ABI Research’s Unlocking the Value of Big Data in Enterprises study, which is part of the firm’s M2M Service Delivery Platforms and Cloud Content and Services research services. Learn more about the study.
