IDC says big data spending to hit $48.6 billion in 2019 Posted on : Dec 01 - 2015

The market for big data technology and services will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent through 2019, according to a forecast issued by research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) on Monday. IDC predicts annual spending will reach $48.6 billion in 2019.

IDC divides the big data market into three major submarkets: infrastructure, software and services. The research firm expects all three submarkets to grow over the next five years, with software — information management, discovery and analytics and applications software — leading the charge with a CAGR of 26 percent.

IDC predicts services, including professional and support services for infrastructure and software, will grow at a CAGR of 22.7 percent. It forecasts that infrastructure — consisting of computing, networking, storage infrastructure and other datacenter infrastructure-like security — will grow at a CAGR of 21.7 percent and will account for roughly half of all spending through 2019.

The biggest verticals

IDC says the discrete manufacturing vertical spends the most on big data ($2.1 billion in 2014), followed by banking ($1.8 billion in 2014) and process manufacturing ($1.5 billion in 2014). The industries with the fastest growth rates include securities and investment services (26 percent CAGR), banking (26 percent CAGR) and media (25 percent CAGR).

 "The ever-increasing appetite of businesses to embrace emerging big data-related software and infrastructure technologies while keeping the implementation costs low has led to the creation of a rich ecosystem of new and incumbent suppliers," Ashish Nadkarni, program director, Enterprise Servers and Storage, IDC, said in a statement Monday. "At the same time, the market opportunity is spurring new investments and M&A activity as incumbent suppliers seek to maintain their relevance by developing comprehensive solutions and new go-to-market paths."

Nadkarni, together with Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics & Big Data, IDC, coauthored the IDC study, Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services Forecast, 2015-2019, which predicts that as big data matures, it will continue to increase its share of the larger business analytics market, even as year-over-year growth begins to slow slightly as a result of that maturity. View More