Spending on big data and business analytics to hit $150bn this year

Worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics are expected to reach $150.8 billion (€141 billion) in 2017, a rise of 12. 6 per cent on last year, according to a new forecast.

Research firm IDC predicts commercial purchases of related hardware, software and services are expected to maintain a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9 per cent through to 2020 when revenues will be more than $210 billion.

Investments will be led by IT and business services, which together will account for more than half of all big data and business analytics revenue in the coming years.

Software investments

Services-related spending will experience the strongest growth with a five-year CAGR of 14.4 per cent, while software investments will grow to more than $70 billion in 2020, led by purchases of end-user query, reporting and analysis and data warehouse management tools.

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From a company size perspective, businesses with more than 1,000 employees will be responsible for almost two-thirds of all big data and business analytics spending over the next four years.

On a geographic basis, the US is forecast to be the largest market for big data and business analytics solutions, with spending forecast to reach $78.8 billion in 2017. The second-largest region will be Western Europe with spending of $34.1 billion this year, followed by Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) at $13.6 billion.

‘Hit mainstream’

“After years of traversing the adoption S-curve, big data and business analytics solutions have finally hit mainstream,” said

Dan Vesset

, IDC group vice president, analytics and information management.

“Big data and business analytics as an enabler of decision support and decision automation is now firmly on the radar of top executives. This category of solutions is also one of the key pillars of enabling digital transformation efforts across industries and business processes globally,” he added.