Gartner, IBM See Big Market for Big Data

Big data is becoming big business, and is a big trending topic in 2012.  This week Gartner and IBM release reports studying the true impact and direction of the big data market, while Teradata launched a big data analytics appliance.

Gartner says big data to reach $34 billion.  As a prelude to the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 it reported that big data will drive $28 billion of worldwide IT spending in 2012, and is forecast to drive $34 billion in 2013 spending.  With 45 percent of the spending each year focused on social network analysis and content analytics, traditional solutions are being adapted to the big data demands. "Despite the hype, big data is not a distinct, stand-alone market, it but represents an industry-wide market force which must be addressed in products, practices and solution delivery," said Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner. "In 2011, big data formed a new driver in almost every category of IT spending. However, through 2018, big data requirements will gradually evolve from differentiation to 'table stakes' in information management practices and technology. By 2020, big data features and functionality will be non-differentiating and routinely expected from traditional enterprise vendors and part of their product offerings."  The report, "Big Data Drives Rapid Changes in Infrastructure and $232 Billion in IT Spending Through 2016" is available on Gartner's website.

IBM and Oxford study big data.  IBM and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford released a new global report saying that big data initiatives are currently focused on improving the customer experience. The report notes that data gathered from social media is being underutilized and organizations typically struggle to manage the uncertainty inherent with the data. Only 25 percent of the survey respondents say they have the required capabilities to analyze highly unstructured data – a major inhibitor to getting the most value from Big Data.

"Most companies recognize the potential for Big Data to improve decision-making and business outcomes across the enterprise. What they struggle with, however, is how to get started on their Big Data journey,” said Michael Schroeck, Global Information Management Leader, IBM Global Business Services. “Across industries and geographies, the survey found that organizations are taking a pragmatic approach to Big Data. While the majority of them are still in the early stages of adoption, leading organizations are beginning to derive significant value from their Big Data initiatives.”  The full study of real-world use of big data can be found here.

Teradata launches big data appliance.  Teradata  introduced the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance, a unified big analytics appliance. The new appliance combines open source Apache Hadoop and Teradata Aster into a single highly-integrated and optimized appliance. It offers pre-packaged ready-to-run analytical functions such as digital marketing optimization, social network analysis, fraud detection, and analysis of machine-generated data in just hours. Designed for truly demanding analytics that require more computational power, memory and data movement, the appliance offers 19 times better data throughput and performs analytics up to 35 times faster than a typical off-the-shelf commodity bundle.

“The Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance offers the faster path from diverse big data acquisition to big insights, and seamlessly delivers these insights to the business owners,” said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. “Unmatched by any other stack in the industry, it enables organizations to overcome the barriers to big data analytics and provides a high-definition view of the business to optimize operations.”

Retailers can benefit from a comprehensive discovery platform with ultra-fast investigative analytics. The big data appliance can harness multi-structured data from social media, Web clickstream, Twitter streams, call center activities, and other types of customer interaction data. This achieves a more accurate picture of consumers’ interests, needs and motivations to buy, and sentiment toward brand.

"Big Analytics offers the opportunity for break-through approaches to discovery-based analytics in old data as well as in new,” said Merv Adrian, research vice president, Gartner. “When we add big analytics to big data and begin to use information that’s in other formats other than relational database rows - like Web logs, content management systems and clouds of instruments on the Internet, we wind up with data types that are compressed into formats that first need to be teased apart for analysis. Gartner clients tell us that combining scored, processed ‘outside data’ with data inside our relational databases is where all the added value is.”