Banks and telcos lead big data analytics spending in APAC

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesia’s Bank Mandiri used its big data platform to determine which branches should remain operational and gave that information to customers and the government’s financial services authority.

In Australia, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne is working on a big data project to bring together multiple data sources so that doctors can intervene earlier in childhood conditions.

The use of big data analytics across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region to solve a variety of business problems and other challenges has been growing and is expected to accelerate amid the pandemic.

According to technology research firm IDC, APAC revenues for big data and analytics solutions are tipped to hit $22.6bn in 2020, with three in four enterprises planning to keep or increase their big data analytics investments this year.

“This is because analytics solutions are an essential business need to enable digital trust and resiliency during the Covid-19 crisis,” said Ritika Srivastava, associate market analyst at IDC Asia/Pacific.

The optimism around big data analytics comes at a time when companies are cutting IT budgets. But with the proven value of technology in combating the impact of the pandemic, such as gaining valuable insights and enhancing productivity among other benefits, IDC called for enterprises to put a data strategy in place to remain competitive.

Banks have been one of the keenest adopters of big data analytics and will remain so as they look to capitalise on financial, transactional and customer data. IDC research showed that spending on big data technology in banking and financial services is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.6% from 2019 to 2024.

Telcos are the next biggest spenders on big data analytics, usually to acquire insights related to customers, sales and marketing. Telcos and banks contributed nearly one-third of spending on big data analytics in the region, while the government and healthcare sectors will see the highest growth rates.

Much of the region’s spending on big data analytics will be in the form of services, which will reach $10bn in 2020, followed by software, mostly in query, analysis, reporting and relational data warehouse management tools. Servers will continue to dominate hardware spending on big data analytics.

The biggest big data analytics market in APAC is China, fuelled by spending by banks as well as local and state governments, according to IDC. In Southeast Asia, countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia are still in the nascent stage of adoption, but their spending will grow by over 15% due to increased investments by many startups and businesses.

“The pandemic has created more urgency for organisations to have data-driven means to support operational resilience and revenue generation,” said Jessie Cai, senior research manager for big data and analytics research at IDC Asia/Pacific.

“IDC predicts many of the operational changes triggered by the pandemic will stay and create a bigger demand for data and analytics technologies in the coming years for countries and industries to compete in the digital economy.”