Big data and analytics revenues continue to rise

Big data and business analytics (BDA) has been identified as a major source of income for the channel and the market continues to grow by double digits.

An analysis of the market from IDC indicated that last year saw 12% growth over last year and forecasts have that level, 13.2% on a compound annual rate, will continue through to 2022.

IT services will be the largest category in the big data and analytics market, followed by hardware and then business services.

"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," said 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," he added.

A lot of the BDA software, around 70%, that will be used by customers is going to be deployed on-premise but there will be a slight shift towards the cloud over the next couple of years.

IDC noted that data analytics can be a difficult technology to deploy and manage and as a result some users are looking to the cloud to take the strain.

"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 digitization 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," said Jessica Goepfert, program vice president, customer insights & analysis at IDC.