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Big Data Overall IT Spend will Reach $48.6B by 2019

The emerging 'big data' market will continue to gain new momentum as more organizations accelerate their digital transformation into agile data-driven entities. This ongoing market development is driving strong growth in big data-related storage infrastructure, software, and associated professional services.

As a result, the big data technology and services market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.1 percent during the 2014-2019 forecast period -- with annual spending reaching $48.6 billion in 2019, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC ).

"The ever-increasing appetite of businesses to embrace emerging big data-related software and infrastructure technologies, while keeping the implementation costs low, has led to the creation of a rich ecosystem of new and incumbent suppliers," said Ashish Nadkarni, program director at IDC.

At the same time, the market opportunity is spurring new investments and M&A activity as incumbent IT vendors seek to maintain their relevance by developing comprehensive solutions and exploring new go-to-market paths.

All three major big data sub-markets -- infrastructure, software, and services -- are expected to grow over the next five years. Infrastructure, which consists of computing, networking, storage infrastructure, and other data center infrastructure -- such as security -- will grow at a 21.7 percent CAGR.

Software, which consists of information management, discovery and analytics, plus user applications software -- will grow at a CAGR of 26.2 percent. And related services, which includes professional consulting and support services for infrastructure and software, will grow at a CAGR of 22.7 percent.

That being said, IDC estimates that infrastructure spending will account for roughly one half of all spending throughout the forecast period. As big data matures, IDC expects its share of the larger Business Analytics market to increase. However, year-over-year growth within the big data market is forecast to gradually slow.

The reduction in overall growth will be largely caused by increased price pressures for storage infrastructure and higher rates of commercialization of Open Source software. Besides, the availability of qualified big data analytics talent (currently a shortage) will also have a significant impact on market development.

While the business drivers, barriers, and potential benefits from deploying big data initiatives can vary by industry, these efforts are primarily focused on delivering a better customer experience, supporting product and service innovation, and optimizing legacy business processes.

According to the IDC assessment, common barriers to big data adoption include security and privacy concerns, as well as the related challenges of collecting, using, and managing customer personal data.

The largest vertical industry markets for big data spending include discrete manufacturing ($2.1 billion in 2014), banking ($1.8 billion in 2014), and process manufacturing ($1.5 billion in 2014). The industries with the fastest big data growth rates include securities and investment services (26 percent CAGR), banking (26 percent CAGR), and media (25 percent CAGR).

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