
But this year, with the barriers to adoption increasingly being addressed, the big data market is poised for accelerated growth and SMEs should not miss out on the party.
Nobody can dispute the huge potential of the big data market. There is more and more data out there, it is getting more diverse and it is growing fast. Technology community, Wikibon predicts that the big data market is currently on pace to top £30bn in 2017, which translates to a 38 per cent compound annual growth rate over the six-year period from 2011 onwards. In reality though, the market remains in its infancy. Most organisations are still doing proof-of-concepts. Very few so far have moved outside the sandbox and into productive use cases. Unfortunately, many businesses have still not taken practical steps to rollout a big data strategy. Just ten per cent of respondents to a recent Talend survey were actually engaged in a large scale rollout, up from two per cent the year before – but still a low number. And it is likely that most of those that have rolled out a strategy, are large enterprises with big budgets and extensive resources. Two of the top three constraints identified in our survey were budgetary restrictions and skills shortages, widely recognised as key barriers to any IT endeavour and areas of particular concern for SMEs and start-ups. The potential scale of most big data projects explains the financial concerns. Also, skills are key because big data requires people to be able to integrate any number of large and inflexible disparate data sources and skilled data scientists to analyse the collective data streams. It would be a challenge for any organisation to overcome, but especially for small businesses with limited resources.Getting a slice of the pie
In 2014, we are already seeing more companies ‘getting their feet wet’ with big data but we will also increasingly see the big data trials across 2013 bearing fruit now, entering into mainstream adoption.Share this story