Worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics (BDA) solutions are forecast to reach $189,1-billion this year, an increase of 12% over 2018. A new update to the Worldwide Semiannual Big Data and Analytics Spending Guide from IDC also shows that BDA revenues will maintain this pace of growth throughout the 2018-2022 forecast with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13,2%. By 2022, IDC expects worldwide BDA revenue will be $274,3-billion.
“Digital transformation is a key driver of BDA spending with executive-level initiatives resulting in deep assessments of current business practices and demands for better, faster, and more comprehensive access to data and related analytics and insights,” says Dan Vesset, group vice-president, Analytics and Information Management at IDC. “Enterprises are rearchitecting to meet these demands and investing in modern technology that will enable them to innovate and remain competitive. BDA solutions are at the heart of many of these investments.”
IT services will be the largest category of the BDA market in 2019 ($77,5-billion), followed by hardware purchases ($23,7-billion), and business services ($20,7-billion). Together, IT and business services will account for more than half of all BDA revenues throughout the forecast and will be among the categories with the fastest growth. BDA-related software revenues will be $67,2-billion in 2019, with end-user query, reporting, and analysis tools ($13,6-billion) and relational data warehouse management tools ($12,1-billion) being the two largest software categories. The BDA technology categories that will see the fastest revenue growth will be non-relational analytic data stores (34% CAGR) and cognitive/AI software platforms (31,4% CAGR).
In terms of deployment, more than 70% of BDA software revenues in 2019 will go toward on-premises solutions. However, revenue for BDA software delivered via the public cloud will experience very strong growth over the five-year forecast (32,3% CAGR) and will represent more than 44% of the total BDA software opportunity in 2022.
“Big Data technologies can be difficult to deploy and manage in a traditional, on premise environment. Add to that the exponential growth of data and the complexity and cost of scaling these solutions, and one can envision the organisational challenges and headaches. However, cloud can help mitigate some of these hurdles. Cloud’s promise of agility, scale, and flexibility combined with the incredible insights powered by BDA delivers a one-two punch of business benefits, which are helping to accelerate BDA adoption,” says Jessica Goepfert, program vice-president, Customer Insights & Analysis at IDC. “When we look at the opportunity trends for BDA in the cloud, the top three industries for adoption are professional services, personal and consumer services, and media. All three industries are rife with disruption and have high levels of digitisation potential. Additionally, we often find many smaller, innovative firms in this space; firms that appreciate the access to technologies that may have historically been out of reach to them either due to cost or IT complexity.”
The industries currently making the largest investments in big data and business analytics solutions are banking, discrete manufacturing, professional services, process manufacturing, and federal/central government. Combined, these five industries will account for nearly half ($91,4-billion) of worldwide BDA revenues this year. The industries that will deliver the fastest BDA growth are securities and investment services (15,3% CAGR) and retail (15,2% CAGR). Retail’s strong growth will enable it to move ahead of federal/central government as the fifth largest industry in 2022.
