In one of its latest reports, TechNavio forecasts that the Hadoop-as-a-Service market, which was worth around $131 million in 2012, will grow at an average annual growth rate of 95.16 percent over the course of the next few years. The firm estimates that Big Data-as-a-Service will rake in rake in $1.9 billion a year by 2016, a topic recently tackled by The Wikibon Project in its Big Data Vendor Revenue and Market Forecast 2012-2017.

In light of these figures, it’s hardly surprising that Amazon recently made its Hadoop distro available in its U.S. AWS GovCloud Region.  Government agencies can now easily crunch their data using Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) in the company’s secure, regulatory compliant environment.

“The AWS GovCloud (US) Region adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) requirements. You can run workloads, including all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and government oriented publically available data, in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Depending on your requirements, you can also run unclassified workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) region to utilize the unique capabilities of this region.”

Oracle has also expanded its footprint in the Big Data space this week with the launch of two new systems: an entry-level analytics appliance, and a heavy-duty configuration that offers double the performance.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 Starter Rack comes equipped with six Sun servers, redundant Infiniband switches and power distribution units, and Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution.  The Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 In-Rack Expansion includes six additional servers and has a maximum capacity of 18 boxes. This latter configuration is available through Oracle Infrastructure as a Service, a deceivingly named program that lets users rent hardware for a monthly fee and deploy it on-premise.