Big data market to be worth $48.6 billion in 2019: IDC

Spending on technology and services related to big data is set to surge to nearly 50 billion by 2019, according a new report, which claims that software will be the main growth driver.

A forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC) sees the big data technology and services market growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.1 per cent over the 2014-2019 forecast period with annual spending reaching USD 48.6 billion in 2019.

And a new IDC Special Study examines spending on big data solutions in greater detail across 19 vertical industries and eight big data technologies.

"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," said Ashish Nadkarni, Programme Director, Enterprise Servers and Storage and co-author of the report with Dan Vesset, Programme Vice President, Business Analytics & Big Data.

"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."

All three sectors of the big data market -infrastructure, software and services - will grow over the next five years.

Software - that includes information management, discovery, analytics and applications will show a CAGR of 22.7 per cent.

All industry sectors are interested in big data but the largest sector is discrete manufacturing, banking and process manufacturing.