Wikibon Sizes the Big Data Market

Although it is common knowledge that the big data market is expanding at a significant rate, few if any have endeavored to actually size the market. Luckily, Jeff Kelly from Wikibon dove into the task and has compiled a very interesting list of vendors by big data revenues, as well as a view of the market as a whole.

As always, lets start with the data. This is a Tableau viz but as we stated before this is the data Wikibon posted in their report.

The big data market size is in US$ billions, with a company breakout in US$ millions per the Wikibon data:

As you can see, Wikibon expects fantastic growth in the Big Data Market: essentially 10x over the next five years. This comes as no surprise if you read their Big Data Manifesto.

"Wikibon believes Big Data is the new definitive source of competitive advantage across all industries. For those organizations that understand and embrace the new reality of Big Data, the possibilities for new innovation, improved agility, and increased profitability are nearly endless."

Needless to say, we agree!

We also believe, as Jeff points out, that the significant growth in the market will introduce some interesting dynamics between the established database players like IBM and the companies purely or mostly focused on Big Data, like Cloudera and Hortonworks. In such a new industry, even small companies have the ability to make a big impact... and also hit some fairly massive revenue numbers.

Our belief is that Tableau users will benefit from whatever changes occur in the industry, because they have access to nearly all of the established market leaders like AsterData, Teradata and Oracle, while also having a gateway to new systems like Hadoop and Attivio (through ODBC). Why choose just one or two when the future is so undefined?

The Big Data story often focuses on database vendors. Although this makes sense in many ways (there is no Big Data without databases!), at the end of the day a massive database is only half of the picture. Companies that want to derive value from their Big Data investment need to analyze the data and gain insight from it. The more massive the data, the more essential that requirement becomes. Tableau's mission is to help people see and understand data- and we will continue to serve our customers looking to do that no matter how large or complex their database.

Thanks to Jeff and Wikibon for performing this analysis and giving us a glimpse into the Big Data future.