Big Growth Ahead for Big Data
- By Paul Mah
- January 31, 2022
Expect big growth to come to the big data this year, with huge growth predicted in areas such as data creation, new data analytics tools, and pay increases for data professionals.
Driving this growth are factors such as intensifying competition as businesses expand, and the growing realization that data can offer a competitive advantage to outperform competitors in today’s digital-centric world.
Growth of data
For a start, data creation leaped forward last year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic with 64.1 zettabytes (ZB) of data created in 2020, according to IDC. From 2020 to 2025, IDC forecasts new data creation to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23%, resulting in approximately 175ZB of data creation by 2025.
When it comes to hardware and software spending, Research and Markets says the global big data and business analytics market is projected to reach USD448 billion in spending by 2027. This translates to a 13 percent CAGR growth from 2017, underscoring the crucial role of data today.
Elsewhere, Israeli startup Firebolt just last week announced a Series C round, raising USD100 million on a USD1.4 billion valuation to take on industry juggernauts the likes of Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery. This is heady growth for a startup that emerged from stealth mode barely 13 months ago.
More talent required
Successfully harnessing the power of data is no walk in the park, however. Barriers include the relative difficulty of implementing specialized data platforms, the effort and specialized training it takes to build up a team of machine learning practitioners, and the need to establish a data culture within the organization.
Some have taken to hiring new talent to accelerate their data journey. For instance, Twitter recently announced that it will employ more than 50 engineers and data scientists to fill various data science and machine learning roles in Singapore.
Some of the new hires will drive foundational research and statistical analyses at Twitter to understand how people are using the social media platform and improve their user experience.
According to a report from the data science and data engineering recruiting teams of US-based recruitment agency Burtch Works, 81% of data science and analytics teams of United States companies are planning to hire during the second half of last year.
And based on its analysis of data scientists and data engineers who changed jobs in Q2 through Q4 of 2021, more than half (51%) of the sample got a base salary increase of 20% or more. Indeed, 16 percent of the sample got a base salary increase of over 30 percent and some early career professionals realized nearly a 50 percent increase in their base salaries when changing jobs.
The age of data
But what are some ways that big data and advanced analytics can offer to savvy organizations?
According to marketing expert Dmytro Spilka, we are now in an age of precision marketing. From identifying spikes in demand and determining the source of new customers, organizations that successfully harness data can rapidly transform their onboard or churn-prevention campaigns to stay one step ahead.
Yet personalization is only as good as the data driving it, and modern models built using “old data” are still likely to deliver inaccurate insights, observes Spilka.
“[Marketers] in the age of the new normal will adopt a more wide-angle approach to data collection, which relies on not only behavioral trends and location-based analytics but also third-party insights on relevant businesses, customers, and competitors to help shape their in-house customer data,” he wrote.
Data will play a growing role in our increasingly data-centric and digital-first world. And only with the right data and data-derived insights can businesses craft industry-leading personalized experiences for their customers.
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/shutter_m
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.