As is tradition, every year at the end of the year I give my predictions for the Big Data trends that we can expect to gain traction in the next year. With 2015 at the doorstep, it is the right moment to reflect at my Big Data predictions of 2014. Did they happen as I foresaw one year ago and what will be the Big Data trends we can expect in 2015? Last year I predicted the following Big Data trends:
- The rise of the Industrial Internet;
- Its going to be cloudy: Big-Data-as-a-Service solutions;
- Security to protect the privacy;
- Personalization will become personal;
- Education will be essential for success;
- Big Data moves into Mixed Data;
- Its time for a Proof of Concept.
If we look back at 2014, we see that a lot has happened in the field of Big Data. According to Gartners 2014 Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies, we are even past the hype. Big Data is on its way to the trough of disillusionment and it will take another 5-10 years before it will reach the plateau of productivity. In its Hype Cycle Special Report Gartner explains that While interest in Big Data remains undiminished, it has moved beyond the peak because the market has settled into a reasonable set of approaches, and the new technologies and practices are additive to existing solutions. What does that mean for my predictions?
The Industrial Internet
Looking back at my predictions of 2014 we see that the Industrial Internet has been taking off, but requires more time than anticipated. General Electric, who dubbed the term the Industrial Internet, is beginning to see strong returns on its Industrial Internet investments. The value created by the Industrial Internet is expected to be $ 1.3 trillion in 2020, while the total technology spend is expected to be $ 514 billion by 2020. This is a Return on Investment of 150%, creating a strong case for manufactures to also invest in Industrial Internet applications. However, the investments required take quite some to be carried out.
In 2014 we also saw the launch of the Industrial Internet Consortium, which aims to bring together the organizations and technologies necessary to accelerate growth of the Industrial Internet by identifying, assembling and promoting best practices. Currently the consortium is 100 members strong, including some of the largest organizations. This will definitely have a major impact on the growth of the Industrial Internet in the coming years.
Big-Data-as-a-Service Solutions
The amount of Big Data solutions available in the cloud has grown dramatically in 2014. Most of the major Big Data vendors nowadays offer a solution in the cloud that enables organizations to easily connect their data and gain insights from it. Data-Analytics-as-a-Service is expected to have a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 150% in the coming years, but we will also see other options hitting the market such as Logs-as-a-Service, BI-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
In the past year, cloud technologies have matured and companies such as Amazon have made it relatively easy to bring all your data into the cloud and connect with it via other platforms. This of course has contributed to the rise of Big-Data-as-a-Service solution providers. For the coming year, this trend will continue to expand.
Security
More than ever is security important for all kinds of organizations. With the amount of data that is created and has to be stored growing, organizations need to pay serious attention to protect that data and therefore the privacy of their customers. The first CEO who had to step down because of a data breach was a fact in 2014. Targets CEO, President and Chairman Gregg Steinhafel resigned from all his positions after the company was hacked and personal information including credit/debit card details of close to 110 million individuals were stolen.
Organizations can secure themselves against such data breaches using Big Data Security Analytics. This trend, which combines a wide variety of data sources to discover security threats, promises great insights for organizations to battle cyber threats. Unfortunately, it is still immature and not yet widely adopted. With more data breaches to expect in the coming years, this will undoubtedly change.
Personalization becomes Personal
Personalization really took off in 2014. Many organizations in a wide range of industries have adopted Big Data to really get to know their customers. They use these insights to offer the right products/services to the right customers at the right moment for the right price via the right channel. Banks for example, started to use the vast amounts of data they have about their customers to create a 360-degree view of each customer based on how each and every one customer uses online and mobile banking, ATMs, branch banking or other channels. Retailers such as Walmart combine different data sources to know exactly what a customer wants. In fact it is the objective of Walmart to know what every product in the world is, they want to know who every person in the world is and they want to have the ability to connect them together in transaction, thereby bringing personalization to a new level.
Education is Essential
Although it will not solve the expected shortages in skilled Big Data talent, 2014 saw the launch of a large amount of Big Data programs at universities and colleges around the globe. In the USA alone already almost 60 programs have launched and also in Europe we saw a large amount of new Big Data programs. In addition, IBM is partnering with 1.000 universities in order to prepare students for Big Data careers. The amount of Big Data programs took off in 2014 and we can expect the first results of this growth in the coming years.
Big Data becomes Mixed Data
Although many Fortune 500 companies are faced with an ever-increasing amount of data flowing into their organization, a lot of Small en Medium Sized Enterprises are not yet faced with Petabytes of data. These organizations need to work with smaller amounts of data and in order to get insights from less data, they need more data sources. In 2014 we noticed that more and more SMEs are also developing a Big Data Strategy and they are combining a variety of different, smaller, data sources to gain insights. So in 2014, Big Data indeed became Mixed Data.
Proof of Concepts
Developing a Big Data Proof of Concept typically takes approximately 18 months and implementing a Big Data strategy is not easy. Therefore a lot of organizations have started with Proof of Concepts to better understand what Big Data can do for them and to learn from it. With the organizations that we advice, we noticed a steep increase in the amount that started with a Proof of Concept. For these companies, 2015 will be the year to move on and make Big Data part of their organization.
The year 2014 is almost finished and we saw a lot of interesting Big Data developments. We are still just at the beginning of an information revolution and therefore 2015 is going to be fascinating as well. In the next post I will share with you my ideas for the Big Data trends of 2015.
