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September 22, 2015

As Big Data Goes Mainstream, Emphasis Shifts to ROI

Investment in big data technologies is slowing, a new forecast concludes, likely signaling a shift away from hype to a mainstream technology in search of new use cases such as shoring up data security in the face of continuing security breaches.

Market researcher Gartner said spending on big data has increased 3 percent over 2014 and three-quarters of the companies it surveyed expect to increase investments over the next two years. However, the rate of investment has slowed as practical challenges emerge. Chief among them is gaining a return on hefty big data technology investments.

Based on its survey results, Gartner declared 2015 the beginning of a shift for big data “away from a topic unto itself, and toward standard practices.” For example, it said 70 percent of those surveyed are using big data technologies to analyze location data while 64 percent are sifting though unstructured text.

“As big data becomes the new normal, information and analytics leaders are shifting focus from hype to finding value,” added Gartner researcher Lisa Kart. “While the perennial challenge of understanding value remains, the practical challenges of skills, governance, funding and return on investment (ROI) have come to the fore.”

Indeed, 43 percent of those planning to invest in big data technologies along with 38 percent of respondents who already have told Gartner they still do not know when their investment would bear fruit. “This uncertainty highlights the challenges in determining the value of big data projects,” the researcher said.

As big data enters the mainstream, the also survey found that senior manager were initiating a larger percentage of big data projects. Last year, CIOs launched 37 percent while “business unit heads” accounted for one-quarter of all projects launched.

The Gartner survey echoes growing concerns about the difficulty enterprises face in extracting value from their big data investments. For instance, an Intel executive recently noted, “The dirty little secret about big data is no one actually knows what to do with it.” Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s Cloud Platforms Group, added that early adopters “think they know what to do with it, and they know they have to collect it because you have to have a big data strategy, of course. But when it comes to actually deriving the insight, it’s a little harder to go do.”

While applications like targeted marketing and streamlining existing business processes remain among the key applications for big data technology, accounting for nearly half of use cases, security is emerging as another application. Gartner reported that enhanced security capabilities registered the largest increase over the past year, from 15 percent of respondents to 23 percent.

The industry survey was conducted in June and included 437 organizations from a wide range of industries.

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