Despite a Skills Gap, Forecasts for Big Data Growth are Rosy

The researchers at Forrester are forecasting big growth for the Big Data market. A new report from them predicts the market will grow at nearly a 13 percent annual rate over the next five years, with “non-relational” platforms like Hadoop and NoSQL segments growing nearly twice as fast. As we've been reporting, NoSQL has become a trend to reckon with, and CouchDB, a leader on the NoSQL scene, has just become available in a significant new version.

Forrester's findings follow a couple of other recent reports pointing to steady growth and job opportunities in the Big Data space.

In the Forrester report, dubbed “New, Evolving Tools To Manage Big Data Will Grow At Double-Digit Rates,” Forrester analyst Jennifer Adams discusses the market through 2021.

“Five years ago, big data was still a buzzword, but today, it’s a standard business practice,” she notes. “In 2016, almost 40% of global data and analytics decision-makers say their firms are implementing as well as expanding big data technology and solutions, and another 30% are planning to adopt big data in the next 12 months.”

Forrester sees non-relational tools, such as NoSQL and Hadoop, outdoing the growth rate of the overall big data market. “We forecast that NoSQL will grow by 25.0% and Hadoop will grow by 32.9% annually over the next five years,” Adams writes. Those are mighty growth rates.

Technavio's market research analysts also predicted that the global Hadoop market will grow at a CAGR of more than 53% over the next four years. The researchers have cited several factors such as data explosion in enterprises and demand for cost-effective solutions to meet big data analytics needs contributing to the growth of this market.

Meanwhile, Allied Market Research has forecasted that the global market for Hadoop along with related hardware, software, and services will reach $50.2 billion by 2020, propelled by greater use of raw, unstructured, and structured data.

But there remains a pronounced shortage of skilled Hadoop workers. Gartner, Inc.'s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years. The study found that there are difficulties hiring skilled Hadoop workers.