Enterprise data lakes are an essential component of many digital transformation projects. Numerous insights about customers, partners and other stakeholders are extracted from these significant commercial assets. Given the benefits, IT infrastructure and associated software investment will increase to support new use cases.
According to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), revenues for big data and business analytics (BDA) solutions will reach $260 billion in 2022 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9 percent over the 2017-2022 forecast period.
BDA revenues are expected to total $166 billion in 2018 — that's an increase of 11.7 percent over 2017.
Big data and analytics market development
The industries making the largest investments in big data and business analytics solutions throughout the forecast are banking, discrete manufacturing, process manufacturing, professional services, and federal or central government. Combined, these five industries will account for nearly half ($81 billion) of worldwide BDA revenues this year.
They will also be the industries with the largest BDA opportunity in 2022 when their total investment is forecast to reach $129 billion. The industries that will deliver the fastest BDA revenue growth are retail (13.5 percent CAGR), banking (13.2 percent CAGR), and professional services (12.9 percent CAGR).
"At a high level, organizations are turning to big data and analytics solutions to navigate the convergence of their physical and digital worlds," said Jessica Goepfert, program vice president at IDC.
According to the IDC assessment, the transformation takes a different shape depending on the industry. For instance, within the banking and retail sector investments are about managing and reinvigorating the customer experience. Whereas in manufacturing, they're reinventing themselves to become more high-tech.
Furthermore, over half of all BDA revenues will go to IT and business services during the course of the forecast. Services-related revenues will also be among the fastest growing areas of opportunity with a combined CAGR of 13.2 percent.
Software investments will grow to more than $90 billion in 2022, led by purchases of end-user query, reporting, and analysis tools and relational data warehouse management tools.
Two of the fastest growing BDA technology categories will be cognitive or AI software platforms (36.5 percent CAGR) and non-relational analytic data stores (30.3 percent CAGR). BDA-related purchases of servers and storage will grow at a CAGR of 7.3 percent, reaching nearly $27 billion in 2022.
Outlook for regional market growth
The US market is the largest by far, delivering nearly $88 billion in BDA revenues this year and more than half of the worldwide total throughout the five-year forecast. Western Europe is the second largest market with 2018 revenues expected to reach $35 billion, followed by the Asia-Pacific region with $23.9 billion.
Japan will be the second largest country for BDA investments in 2018, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, and China. The countries with the fastest growth in BDA solutions are Argentina (20.8 percent CAGR), Vietnam (19.8 percent CAGR), Philippines (19.5 percent CAGR), and Indonesia (19.4 percent CAGR).