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July 7, 2015

Massive Data Volumes Driving Analytics Market

The maturing big data software market is forecast to grow almost as fast as the increasingly unwieldy data volumes it is designed to organize and analyze.

London-based market researcher Ovum said this week the projected six-fold increase in the big data software market by 2019 signals the technology’s coming of age. “The experimental era of big data is coming to an end [and] organizations are formalizing their use of big data technology to realize the business value they expect to find,” Ovum analyst Tom Pringle noted in a statement releasing the forecast.

Big data software currently accounts for only a small portion of what the market analyst refers to as information management software. As data analytics emerges as a core enterprise capability, Ovum predicts the market is poised to grow at a 50-percent compound annual growth rate through 2019.

Overall, the information management software market is growing at an 11-percent annual clip, with business intelligence and data analytics accounting for most of the surge.

Ovum also sees a fundamental shift occurring in the market as open source technology accessible at relatively low cost is being replaced by commercial Hadoop distributions and “fast-growing ecosystems” that will extend the technology into more enterprises. Hence, Ovum pegs the business intelligence and analytics software markets at $15.85 billion this year, doubling in size by 2019.

“Self-service [business intelligence], enabling a whole new universe of users, is driving the expansion of the market,” Pringle said, “with easier to use self-serve tools becoming mainstream.” The steady enterprise shift to the cloud along with mobile access is also are fueling the big data software market, he added.

As data analytics makes steady headway in the enterprise, Ovum forecast that data management software would still account for more than 40 percent of total software spending in 2015. That total is expected to exceed $24 billion. Moreover, spending on data management software is expected to remain healthy through the end of the decade, growing a 9-percent annual rate.

Pringle attributed the bullish forecast to both the relentless growth of corporate data volumes and the “heterogeneous range of data types and the speed with which those data are generated.”

Increasingly, that means greater volumes of raw, unstructured data that require an inordinate amount of time for data scientists to prepare for analysis. A study released earlier this month by Xplenty, a big data integration platform vendor, found that one-third of business intelligence analysts spend up to 90 percent of their time “cleaning” raw data.

More than half of data scientists surveyed told San Francisco-based Xplenty that merging data from different sources was their main challenge. While 55 percent said integrating data from different platforms was their biggest headache, “cleansing” and formatting data was cited by 39 percent of respondents as a key task.

Hence, while the business intelligence software market continues to boom, practitioners are increasingly being referred to as “data janitors.”

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