IDC Releases First Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services Market Forecast

IDC predicted that Big Data market will be big and grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40% or about 7 times that of the overall information and communications technology (ICT) market.

According to a study conducted by MGI (McKinsey Global Institute), if US healthcare were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year. Two-thirds of that would be in the form of reducing US healthcare expenditure by about 8 percent. In the developed economies of Europe, government administrators could save more than €100 billion ($149 billion) in operational efficiency improvements alone by using big data, not including using big data to reduce fraud and errors and boost the collection of tax revenues. And users of services enabled by personal-location data could capture $600 billion in consumer surplus.

"The Big Data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and startups vie for customers and market share," said Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics Solutions at IDC. "For technology buyers, opportunities exist to use Big Data technology to improve operational efficiency and to drive innovation. Use cases are already present across industries and geographic regions.

"There are also Big Data opportunities for both large IT vendors and start ups," Vesset continued. "Major IT vendors are offering both database solutions and configurations supporting Big Data by evolving their own products as well as by acquisition. At the same time, more than half a billion dollars in venture capital has been invested in new Big Data technology."

Additional findings from IDC's study include the following:

• While the five-year CAGR for the worldwide market is expected to be nearly 40%, the growth of individual segments varies from 27.3% for servers and 34.2% for software to 61.4% for storage.
• The growth in appliances, Cloud, and outsourcing deals for Big Data technology will likely mean that over time end users will pay increasingly less attention to technology capabilities and will focus instead on the business value arguments. System performance, availability, security, and manageability will all matter greatly. However, how they are achieved will be less of a point for differentiation among vendors.
• Today there is a shortage of trained Big Data technology experts, in addition to a shortage of analytics experts. This labor supply constraint will act as an inhibitor of adoption and use of Big Data technologies, and it will also encourage vendors to deliver Big Data technologies as cloud-based solutions.

"While software and services make up the bulk of the market opportunity through 2015, infrastructure technology for Big Data deployments is expected to grow slightly faster at 44% CAGR. Storage, in particular, shows the strongest growth opportunity, growing at 61.4% CAGR through 2015," said Benjamin S. Woo, program vice president, Storage Systems at IDC. "The significant growth rate in revenue is underscored by the large number of new open source projects that drive infrastructure investments."

See the IDC "Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012–2015 Forecast" report for detail.