According to Gartner, big data will drive $28 billion of worldwide IT spending in 2012 and $34 billion by 2013.
As per Gartner, currently, most companies spend on adapting traditional solutions to big data technologies and platforms, such as machine and social data and unpredictable velocity. Only about $4.3 billion in software sales will be driven directly by demands for new big data functionality in 2012.
Currently, big data has the most significant impact in social network analysis and content analytics with 45 per cent of new spending each year. According to Gartner, in traditional IT supplier markets, application infrastructure and middleware is most affected (10 per cent of new spending each year is influenced by big data in some way) when compared with storage software, database management system, data integration/quality, business intelligence or supply chain management (SCM).
Mark Beyer, research vice president, Gartner, says, “Despite the hype, big data is not a distinct, stand-alone market, it but represents an industry wide market force which must be addressed in products, practices and solution delivery.”
He adds, “In 2011, big data formed a new driver in almost every category of IT spending. However, through 2018, big data requirements will gradually evolve from differentiation to ‘table stakes’ in information management practices and technology. By 2020, big data features and functionality will be non-differentiating and routinely expected from traditional enterprise vendors and part of their product offerings.”
Gartner says that big data opportunities emerged when several advances in different IT categories aligned in a short period at the end of the last decade, creating a dramatic increase in computing technology capacity. This new capacity, coupled with latent demands for analysis of dark data, social networks data and operational technology (or machine data), created an environment highly conducive for rapid innovation.
By the end of 2015, Gartner expects leading organisations to begin using experience in big data in an almost embedded form in their architectures and practices. Beginning in 2018, big data solutions will offer increasingly less of a distinct advantage over traditional solutions that have incorporated new features and functions to support greater agility when addressing volume, variety and velocity. However, Gartner notes that the skills, practices and tools currently viewed as big data solutions will persist as leading organisations will have incorporated the design principles and acquired the skills necessary to address big data concerns as routine flexibility.
