Big Data Escalating Innovation In Asian Enterprises: IDC

IDC expects the Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) Big Data technology and services market to grow at a 34.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from US$548.4 million in 2012 to US$2.38 billion in 2017.

According to the IDC report, “Asia/Pacific Big Data Technology and Services 2013–2017 Analysis and Forecast: The Journey to Tech+ Transformation Continues, Next Stop Is Innovation”, investments in Big Data and analytics (BDA) are surfacing across a broader spectrum of use cases in APEJ. However, many Big Data initiatives are still focused on optimising existing business processes and improving customer engagement.

This IDC study examines the Big Data technology and services market for the period 2011-2017. The Big Data market is an aggregation of the storage, server, networking, software (e.g., information management software, discovery and analytics software, and applications software), and services market segments — each with several sub-segments, which are provided this time to make the study more comprehensive.

Starting with this forecast, IDC is including a percentage of public cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider revenue that IDC believes makes up for the Big Data component running in that infrastructure.

This market forecast also includes an additional split of the market based on maturity of adoption. This categorises the 13 main markets in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) or APEJ into three categories: leaders, midstream, and starters. IDC looks at contributing factors to the differing levels of maturity in the region, including levels of competition, government stability, and impacts of urbanisation.

“IDC believes organisations in this region will increase their focus on innovation projects, as they extend their use of sophisticated analytics solutions and gain more experience managing complex data environments,” says Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, Senior Program Manager, APEJ Big Data and Analytics and Enterprise Applications.

Reflecting on his observations that there has been a growth in the amount of social interaction data being collected and analysed in the past year, Jimenez explains that Big Data is an evolving discipline, and IDC expects it to continue. “In the coming years, IDC expects to see exponential interest in the insights hidden in geolocation information. This will push all legal boundaries and expectations of privacy. We expect this to be a discussion that spreads across the markets in APEJ.”

Craig Stires, Research Director, APEJ Big Data and Analytics, notes that significant efforts are already being made in Australia and Singapore to leverage Big Data for improved customer engagement.

“These countries and others in the ’leaders’ category are expected to invest more in services as a proportion of their overall Big Data spend. This is largely driven by these countries investing more heavily in consulting resources, at relatively high price points, to design and implement solutions according to emerging best practices,” says Stires.

“In the ‘midstream’ category, we see countries that have not traditionally had a strong analytics culture, but have data challenges on massive scales. China and India are making significant investments in Big Data, with much of the focus on infrastructure spending during the forecast period driven by hyperscale datacenters build-outs.”