2019 Revenues for Big Data and Business Analytics Will Reach $189.1 Billion

Worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics (BDA) solutions are forecast to reach $189.1 billion this year, an increase of 12.0% over 2018, according to IDC. Predictions also show that BDA revenues will maintain this pace of growth throughout the 2018-2022 forecast with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.2%. By 2022, IDC expects worldwide BDA revenue will be $274.3 billion.

"Digital transformation is a key driver of BDA spending with executive-level initiatives resulting in deep assessments of current business practices and demands for better, faster, and more comprehensive access to data and related analytics and insights," said Dan Vesset, group vice president, Analytics and Information Management at IDC. "Enterprises are rearchitecting to meet these demands and investing in modern technology that will enable them to innovate and remain competitive. BDA solutions are at the heart of many of these investments.

IT services will be the largest category of the BDA market in 2019 ($77.5 billion), followed by hardware purchases ($23.7 billion), and business services ($20.7 billion). Together, IT and business services will account for more than half of all BDA revenues throughout the forecast and will be among the categories with the fastest growth.

BDA-related software revenues will be $67.2 billion in 2019, with end-user query, reporting, and analysis tools ($13.6 billion) and relational data warehouse management tools ($12.1 billion) being the two largest software categories. The BDA technology categories that will see the fastest revenue growth will be non-relational analytic data stores (34.0% CAGR) and cognitive/AI software platforms (31.4% CAGR).

In terms of deployment, more than 70% of BDA software revenues in 2019 will go toward on-premises solutions. However, revenue for BDA software delivered via the public cloud will experience very strong growth over the five-year forecast (32.3% CAGR) and will represent more than 44% of the total BDA software opportunity in 2022.

The industries currently making the largest investments in big data and business analytics solutions are banking, discrete manufacturing, professional services, process manufacturing, and federal/central government. Combined, these five industries will account for nearly half ($91.4 billion) of revenues this year.

On a geographic basis, the United States will be the largest country market by a wide margin with nearly $100 billion in BDA revenues this year. Japan and the UK will generate revenues of $9.6 billion and $9.2 billion respectively this year, followed by China ($8.6 billion) and Germany ($7.9 billion). From a company size perspective, very large businesses (those with more than 1,000 employees) will be responsible for nearly two thirds of all BDA revenues throughout the forecast.