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Big Data Trends to Watch in 2017

Ovum predicts machine learning will be the big disruptor
Tony Baer

Big data continues to be the fastest-growing segment of the information management software market. New findings released by Ovum estimate that the big data market will grow from $1.7bn in 2016 to $9.4bn by 2020, comprising 10% of the overall market for information management tooling.

Ovum’s 2017 Trends to Watch: Big Data report highlights that while the breakout use case for big data in 2017 will be streaming, machine learning will be the factor that disrupts the landscape the most.

Key 2017 trends:

■ Machine learning will be the biggest disruptor for big data analytics in 2017.

■ Making data science a team sport will become a top priority.

■ IoT use cases will push real-time streaming analytics to the front burner.

■ The cloud will sharpen Hadoop-Spark “co-opetition.”

■ Security and data preparation will drive data lake governance.

Under the covers, machine learning is already becoming ubiquitous as it is embedded in many services that consumers take for granted. Increasingly, machine learning is becoming embedded in enterprise software and tooling for integrating and preparing data. Machine learning is placing a stress on enterprises to make data science a team sport; a big area for growth in 2017 will be solutions that spur collaboration, so the models and hypotheses that data scientists develop do not get bottled up on their desktops.

Fastest-Growing Use Case: Real-Time Streaming

While machine learning continues to grab the headlines, real-time streaming will become the fastest-growing use case.

A perfect storm has transformed real-time streaming from a niche technology to one with broad, cross-industry appeal. Open source technology has lowered barriers to entry for both technology providers and customers; scalable commodity infrastructure has made the processing of large torrents of real-time data in motion economically and technically feasible.

The explosion in bandwidth and smart-sensor technology has opened up use cases ranging from location-based marketing to health and safety, intrusion detection, and predictive maintenance, appealing to a broad cross section of industries.

Underscoring and enabling the growth of big data is the growing predominance of cloud computing as the default path to deployment.

Cloud Dominates Big Data

Within the next 24 months, Ovum expects that the cloud will pass the halfway mark to dominate new big data deployments.

Big data has emerged from its infancy to transition from buzzword to urgency for enterprises across all major sectors. The growing pains are being abetted by machine learning, which will lower barriers to adoption of big data-enabled analytics and solutions, and the growing dominance of the cloud, which will ease deployment hurdles.

Tony Baer is Principal Analyst for Information Management at Ovum.

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Big Data Trends to Watch in 2017

Ovum predicts machine learning will be the big disruptor
Tony Baer

Big data continues to be the fastest-growing segment of the information management software market. New findings released by Ovum estimate that the big data market will grow from $1.7bn in 2016 to $9.4bn by 2020, comprising 10% of the overall market for information management tooling.

Ovum’s 2017 Trends to Watch: Big Data report highlights that while the breakout use case for big data in 2017 will be streaming, machine learning will be the factor that disrupts the landscape the most.

Key 2017 trends:

■ Machine learning will be the biggest disruptor for big data analytics in 2017.

■ Making data science a team sport will become a top priority.

■ IoT use cases will push real-time streaming analytics to the front burner.

■ The cloud will sharpen Hadoop-Spark “co-opetition.”

■ Security and data preparation will drive data lake governance.

Under the covers, machine learning is already becoming ubiquitous as it is embedded in many services that consumers take for granted. Increasingly, machine learning is becoming embedded in enterprise software and tooling for integrating and preparing data. Machine learning is placing a stress on enterprises to make data science a team sport; a big area for growth in 2017 will be solutions that spur collaboration, so the models and hypotheses that data scientists develop do not get bottled up on their desktops.

Fastest-Growing Use Case: Real-Time Streaming

While machine learning continues to grab the headlines, real-time streaming will become the fastest-growing use case.

A perfect storm has transformed real-time streaming from a niche technology to one with broad, cross-industry appeal. Open source technology has lowered barriers to entry for both technology providers and customers; scalable commodity infrastructure has made the processing of large torrents of real-time data in motion economically and technically feasible.

The explosion in bandwidth and smart-sensor technology has opened up use cases ranging from location-based marketing to health and safety, intrusion detection, and predictive maintenance, appealing to a broad cross section of industries.

Underscoring and enabling the growth of big data is the growing predominance of cloud computing as the default path to deployment.

Cloud Dominates Big Data

Within the next 24 months, Ovum expects that the cloud will pass the halfway mark to dominate new big data deployments.

Big data has emerged from its infancy to transition from buzzword to urgency for enterprises across all major sectors. The growing pains are being abetted by machine learning, which will lower barriers to adoption of big data-enabled analytics and solutions, and the growing dominance of the cloud, which will ease deployment hurdles.

Tony Baer is Principal Analyst for Information Management at Ovum.

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Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

We just surveyed 300 frontend and mobile engineers across 16 countries, and the finding that keeps sticking with me isn't the one about AI. It's this: 74% of engineering teams rate themselves in the "middle" of the observability maturity scale. Not reactive, not strategic. Stuck in the middle. They have dashboards, they have tracing, they have alerts. And yet when something goes wrong, they still can't tell you why ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 25, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses  AI's impact on the Wide Area Network (WAN) ... 

Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

The race to deploy AI is largely over. Most enterprises have entered it. The question now is not whether artificial intelligence is running inside the organization. The question is whether anyone is genuinely responsible for what it does. That is not a technical question. It is a leadership one. And most organizations are not yet structured to answer it honestly ...

A new analysis of 250 real-world queries across common retail tasks, such as product pricing, availability, ratings, shipping and specifications, reveals systemic inefficiency at the heart of web-based AI agents. On average, 97.9% of the data retrieved by agents from live web pages is irrelevant to the query being answered. Specifically, the average page ingested ran nearly 9,000 characters, while the average answer was just 32 characters, resulting in a noise-to-signal ratio of 278:1. Price queries were the most extreme outlier, with noise rates approaching 99.5%. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural problem ...

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...