These past couple of weeks have been busy for theCUBE, with a continuous stream of new and repeat guests making appearances during SiliconANGLE’s BigDataSV event at the Hilton Santa Clara and an equally packed agenda over at the O’Reilly Strata Conference across the street. Our coverage kicked into high gear after the release of Wikibon’s third annual Big Data Vendor Revenue and Market Forecast, which author Jeff Kelly stopped by to discuss with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante.

Companies spent $18.6 billion on analytics in 2013, according to the report, up 58 percent over the previous 12 months and about two and a half times more than in 2011. Kelly estimates that the industry will pass the $28 billion mark by the end of this year and achieve revenues of over $50 billion in 2017, a massive increase he credits to rapidly growing demand for emerging solutions such as NoSQL databases as well as more established technologies that are proving valuable in extracting insights.

“There’s a lot of technologies that are not necessarily new but are being applied to Big Data. That can be data visualization, data integration and then of course we have services as well that help companies both from a technical perspective, architect systems, but also determine things like the best use cases to start with and building the business base,” Kelly details. Hardware is also a big piece of the puzzle, having accounted for 22 percent of the overall market in 2013. But analytics is not just about the technology, he stresses – it represents a fundamentally different approach to driving business value that also encompasses the use of information from multiple sources, new operating models such as hyperscale and perhaps most important, real-time decision making.

This so-called Big Data mindset was pioneered by the giants of Web 2.0, and is now finally starting to take off in the enterprise in tandem with the proliferation of mobile devices and cloud computing. As Furrier explains, “the key with the Big Data movement is that you have the maturation of the platform and cloud, you have the smartphone, mobile-only, mobile-first buzz, and more fundamentally you have a business model behind it that delivers value, that people will pay for. Business model, good market timing is ultimately what Web 2.0 didn’t have.”

Moving beyond the hype

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Big Data has grown beyond the early adopters, that much is clear. In a follow-up session Vellante observes that partnership announcements dominated Strata, a historically product-centric event that caters primarily to practitioners (however, that too is beginning to change). Still, there was no shortage of notable product updates at the summit: MapR announced new functionality and integrations, Cloudera repackaged its portfolio and several other vendors introduced important enhancements to their products.

“The market is high, looking at the growth opportunities, [there is a] significant Big Data marketplace. Lots of growth potential, this thing is busting out at the seams, valuations are obviously high, expectations are high, I think you’re gonna start to see people drop out, tap out – the customers are voting with their wallets now,” Furrier adds. Competition is accelerating as adoption continues to increase and vendors step up engineering in a bid to gain an edge over the competition, with the top Hadoop distributors leading the charge.

Cloudera is following in the footsteps of Oracle and making an aggressive push for the enterprise, while Hortonworks is going down the open source route with a community-centric expansion plan. MapR meanwhile is taking a hybrid approach, hoping to offer customers the best of both worlds. All three are working to broaden their channel reach as part of an effort to provide an end-to-end solution that can effectively address the full spectrum of enterprise Big Data requirements.

“You’re seeing real traction, especially from the big three distro vendors. MapR, Cloudera Hortonworks, all three of them are doing business. This is a big beach, they each got their strip of sand on the beach, it’s a sunny day, and they’re doing business,” Vellante comments in a subsequent discussion on theCUBE. Like Furrier, he believes that the market is poised for even more growth in 2014. “You’re gonna see some IPOs come out of this, you already have guys like Splunk and Tableau, but some of the core Hadoop vendors are gonna be going public soon.”

Wall Street is focusing its attention on established Big Data vendors, but Furrier sees more potential in the startup space. Small firms with big ideas set the pace of innovation in Silicon Valley, and the next wave of disruption is long overdue.

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