Frost & Sullivan sees major growth in Big Data analytics

Big Data analytics (BDA) solutions are gaining popularity as hyper-connectivity and ubiquitous smart networks that form the Internet of Things” generate a vast amount of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

With the volume and speed of data generation far surpassing the threshold of manageability, big data technologies are used by leading firms to obtain timely intelligence that helps make business decisions and respond to market conditions quickly.

A new analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Global Big Data Analytics Market, finds the market enjoyed revenues of $3.20 billion in 2013, and estimates this to increase up to $15.10 billion in 2020.

The study covers data discovery and visualization (DDV), as well as advanced analytics (AA). Real-time DDV solutions are in high demand as organizations are keen to standardize the visualization, analysis and reporting of data.

On the other hand, an exponential return on investment from AA solutions suggests that these too will strongly penetrate various industry verticals, such as government, financial services and telecommunications.

“High spending on data architectures to identify opportunities for future growth is driving the development of big data analytics solutions,” said Frost & Sullivan Digital Media Industry Analyst Hiral Jasani. “Further, the affordability of tried and tested open-source big data computing frameworks such as Hadoop is fuelling demand.”

Encouraged by these trends, vendors are catering to a number of use cases across industry verticals. Frost & Sullivan has identified four broad categories of use cases in the market — customer insights, resource optimization, processes/productivity improvement and risk, security and intelligence. End-users are particularly interested in solutions that facilitate customer segmentation and market basket analysis. These should be the prime focus areas for big data analytics vendors keen on developing a vertical agnostic platform as they are some of the most widely implemented applications in the market. Along with these, risk, security and intelligence applications such as credit card fraud detection, cyber-attack prediction and investment risk modeling are known to yield astronomical returns.

That said, the market is still in validation mode and companies are wary of investing in these costly deployments that run well into six- to seven -figure deals. Advanced analytics is still a rich man’s market and organizations hesitate to invest heavily due to an absence of tangible results for some applications.

Companies are also discouraged by the high cost of switching from legacy to new infrastructure suited for big data flow. Cost concerns, along with a lack of a Big Data implementation strategy and issues surrounding data redundancy and inconsistency are the major challenges facing this market.

“Organizations must identify the right amount of storage they need and address data integration and data governance issues to make proper use of big data analytics solutions,” explained Jasani. “In addition to this daunting task, the management team has to ensure that the results collected from big data analytics solutions are not underutilized.”

For their part, Big Data analytics vendors are investing in extensive R&D to introduce technological advancements. The market is ripe for acquisitions. Innovative Big Data technologies continue to spring up and larger vendors show high willingness to dig deeper into their pockets in order to expand their product portfolio so as to meet a wide range of industry needs.