Dive Brief:

• IDC says the market for big data technology and services will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23% through 2019.
• IDC predicts overall annual spending on Big Data will reach $48.6 billion in 2019.
• The research firm says an eventual reduction in overall Big Data growth will likely be caused by “increased price pressures for infrastructure and higher rates of commercialization of open source software.”

Dive Insight:

IDC’s report, Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services Forecast, 2015–2019, also predicts that as Big Data matures, it will continue to increase its share of the larger business analytics market.

"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, program director at IDC and coauthor of the report. "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."

A report released by Bluewolf in September found that many companies are still challenged to make sense of the Big Data they collect. As a result, more than two-thirds of companies surveyed planned to invest in analytics offerings to address this issue in the next year.