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Big data may be relatively new but it has already become a $46 billion sector in 2016 revenues.
With already large sales of vendor products and services and predictions that companies will spend more than $72 billion on big data hardware, software, and professional services by the end of 2020, according to SNS Research, the potential growth of the industry is huge.
Growth is expected at a CAGR of 12% over the next four years and spending is shifting away from being hardware dominated to software dominated by more than $7bn by the end of 2020.
It would appear that big data then is successfully overcoming the challenges it has faced in the form of privacy concerns and organisational resistance, the report said.
The growth has been attributed to a number of factors, according to the summary of the report: “Amid the proliferation of real time data from sources such as mobile devices, web, social media, sensors, log files and transactional applications, Big Data has found a host of vertical market applications, ranging from fraud detection to scientific R&D."
Big data vendors in recent months have become a little quiet, but this clearly doesn’t mean that the market is slowing down. This quiet period is coming more as a result of the establishment of big data analytics as a necessity for businesses.
Rather than being a new and exciting tech trend, big data has started to move towards maturity. What this means is that vendors have to take a different approach. There is less of the groundbreaking product releases and more focus on the fine details.
Vendors such as Cloudera for example have been placing a greater emphasis on data management strategy. It is building blocks like this which will help to underpin the prolonged success of becoming a data driven business.