Extreme Data: High Speed Growth Predicted for Big Data Market

During the start of 2012, analysts have been busy collecting data points and crunching the numbers to determine the size and trajectory of the Big Data market.  There is some divergence between the results of the analyses — but it’s all about how you interpret the numbers.

A report from Deloitte predicts a fairly modest market size for Big Data is in the range of a couple of billion dollars.  The Deloitte report says that “as recently as 2009 there were only a handful of big data projects and total industry revenues were under $100 million. By the end of 2012 more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500 will likely have at least some big data initiatives under way.  Industry revenues will be in the range of $1-1.5 billion…  90 percent of analytic systems/data warehouses have less than five terabytes of data and can be handled by tradtional database tools and analytics.  This would suggest that the value of the DB+ERP+BI requireing big data solutions would be at most $7 billion in 2012.  Further assuming that it is still relatively early in the adoption cycle, 15-20 percent of that total might be converted in 2012, which drives a range of roughly $1-1.5 billion.”

A second report authored by Jeff Kelly of Wikibon predicts a much larger market size for Big Data.  Wikibon analysts sees 10x growth of Big Data over the next five years, topping $50 billion.  Services takes 44 percent of the market, hardware is at 31 percent, and software is 25 percent.  Kelly wrote that “as of early 2012, the big data market stands at just over $5 billion based on related software, hardware, and services revenue. Increased interest in and awareness of the power of big data and related analytic capabilities to gain competitive advantage and to improve operational efficiencies, coupled with developments in the technologies and services that make big data a practical reality, will result in a super-charged CAGR of 58% between now and 2017.”

Wikibon estimates that IBM is the leading player now in Big Data with more than $1 billion of it’s revenues being derived from Big Data.  Whereas, it classifies HP’s Vertica as the most innovative in the sector.

Deloitte is more cautious in their predictions, saying that “Big data in 2012 will likely be dominated by pilot projects; there will probably be fewer than 50 full-scale big data projects (10 PBs and above) worldwide.”

The platform dominating the Big Data market is Hadoop.  But it isn’t alone.  Other Big Data platforms include Splunk, HPCC, and Apache Cassandra.