Who knew that there could be so much money in analyzing data? According to IDC, the analytics market will be worth $50.7 billion by 2016. And that’s without breaking a sweat.
The value in analytics scales with the mountains of data we amass. It’s akin to something I wrote about years ago for CNET: 21st Century businesses thrive by driving abundance and then selling minimization of complexity inherent in that abundance. It’s what Red Hat does with open source, what Google does with search, and what Facebook does with social. It’s also what companies like Nodeable do with all the data your marketing/IT operations/sales/etc. systems throw off.
There are a few interesting stories buried in the growth of analytics, but perhaps the biggest is Hadoop. While the overall analytics market grew by 14 percent in 2011, IDC has the Hadoop market growing by 60 percent each year through 2016. Admittedly, that’s off a small base, but at that pace the Hadoop ecosystem, which Forrester already sizes at $1 billion per year, will be very, very big.
Big money for Big Data.
And for such a comparative pittance. Hadoop, as I’ve argued before, has democratized data. Big Data analytics used to be the province of expensive data warehousing systems, complete with proprietary software, expensive, proprietary hardware, and a smiling salesperson with their palm out, waiting for you to mortgage your house. Not anymore. Hadoop is open source and is run on commodity hardware. It’s a game even cash-strapped organizations can play.
It’s not perfect. Hadoop can’t do real-time, for example, which is why Nodeable buttresses its fantastic batch-processing capabilities with the real-time computation heroics of Storm. Storm, of course, is also open source.
Which is what is so fascinating in this Big Data gold rush: it’s being driven by free and open-source software. No wonder the market is growing in such dramatic fashion: it’s not being gated by vendors anymore. That’s good news for all of us…including vendors.
Filed under: Big Data
