Global spending on big data will exceed $31 billion in 2013, according to a recent forecast by ABI Research.
The spending will grow at a CAGR of 29.6 percent over the next five years, reaching $114 billion in 2018.
The forecast includes the money spent on internal salaries, professional services, technology services, internal hardware, and internal software.
According to ABI Research, big data initiatives salaries account for about half of the current spending with other half allocated to vendors’ products and services.
A good share of the money is spent on the associated professional services, which have sprung up to assist firms that are data-rich but skills-poor, the research said.
Narrowing the said skills gap, as well as improving the productivity of dedicated data scientists, represents a lucrative revenue opportunity for the sector’s vendors, the research said. Projects like Cloudera’s Impala project, the hitherto readiest attempt to enable SQL on Hadoop clusters, is an example of this demand being addressed on the database front.
A lot of innovation is expected to happen from the field of analytics. Machine learning and its application in advanced analytics is one area that will make both the public and private sectors data-savvier than anything else.
While big players such as IBM and HP are understandably moving to this direction, analytics startups, like Ayasdi and Skytree have machine learning in their very DNA. Eventually, such innovations will put analytics within any domain expert’s reach. At that point, data will stop being ‘big’ again.