The big data technology and services market is expected to grow at a 27% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to $32,4-billion through 2017 – or about six times the growth rate of the overall information and communication technology (ICT) market.

Although there are multiple scenarios that could unfold and many demand and supply variables remain in flux, IDC expects the market to exhibit strong growth over the next five years.

“The big data technology and services market represents a fast-growing multibillion-dollar worldwide opportunity,” says Dan Vesset, vice-president for IDC’s business analytics and big data research. “The big data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and start-ups vie for customers and market share.”

Additional findings from IDC’s forecast include the following:

* The growth of individual segments of the market varies with cloud infrastructure having the highest CAGR of 49% through 2017.

* Decision automation solutions based on big data technology will increasingly begin to replace or significantly impact knowledge worker roles.

* A significant amount of data that can be described as big data in the data centres will either get disposed of or archived to the cloud, which will result in lower revenue for traditional storage in the datacenters.

“Because of the rapidly developing nature of this market, IDC continues to review the methodology and forecast assumptions on an ongoing basis,” says Ashish Nadkarni, research director: storage systems and big data research at IDC. “IDC made a number of changes to the Big Data market sizing and forecast presented in this document, including the addition of infrastructure software, such as security and data centre management, and high performance data analysis (HPDA), which the company considers to be a portion of High Performance Computing (HPC) market that fits within IDC’s big data definition.”