Gartner Rolls Out Survey Analysis: Big Data Investment Grows but Deployments Remain Scarce in 2014

Proquest LLC

Investment in big data technologies continues to expand, according to Survey Analysis: Big Data Investment Grows but Deployments Remain Scarce in 2014, a recent survey by Gartner.

In a release, the Company noted that the survey found that 73 percent of respondents have invested or plan to invest in big data in the next 24 months, up from 64 percent in 2013.The number of organizations stating they had no plans for big data investment fell from 31 percent in 2013 to 24 percent in 2014.

"Big data investment continues to be led by North America, with 47 percent of organizations reporting investment, up from 37.8 percent in 2013," said Nick Heudecker, research director at Gartner. "All other regions experienced increases in investment over the last year.

"Last year, we said 2013 was big data's year of experimentation and early deployment. So is 2014. In 2013, only eight percent of organizations reported having big data projects deployed to production. This has increased to 13 percent in 2014, and while still relatively small, represents a sizeable increase. However, the 6 percent drop in organizations still gathering knowledge about big data and the seven percent increase in pilots and experiments indicate that organizations are evolving in their understanding and willingness to explore big data opportunities."

"Big data can help address a wide range of business problems across many industries and for the third year in our study, both enhancing the customer experience and improving process efficiency are the top areas to address," said Lisa Kart, research director at Gartner. "The most dramatic changes are in enhancing customer experience, especially in transportation, healthcare, insurance, media and communications, retail, and banking. Another area where we see an increase is using big data to develop information products, where organizations are looking to monetize their data. This is especially true among IT vendors, government and manufacturing."

"We got a surprising result when we asked respondents which data sources they planned on adding in the future," said Heudecker. "Every data source received roughly 30 percent to 40 percent of responses, including extremely challenging data sources like audio and video. This overly optimistic and apparently random nature of future data sources for analysis indicates two things. First, organizations don't have a plan for what they're going to do next. Picking everything isn't a strategy. It indicates a fear of missing out on an opportunity yet to be defined. Also, there may be a certain amount of hubris at work. If organizations can 'do big data' on transactions and log data, they may assume they can also leverage more challenging data sources as easily."