Western Europe is lagging behind the U.S. in terms of Big Data use due to a shortage of skills and worries over data security, according to a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC).

The rate of adoption has also been slowed by the area’s struggling economy and recent EU regulations like the “right to be forgotten”, which has called data usage and ownership into question.

IDC says European firms are particularly worried about this controversial new law, which “goes to the very heart of a company’s ability to mine even anonymised data”, and could “negatively impact the value of collecting certain data if a company is not allowed to use it via big-data tools for business purposes,” the report said.

Despite these concerns, IDC has an optimistic forecast for western Europe’s Big Data technology and services market. Its report, verbosely titled Western Europe big data technology and services 2011–2013 market size and 2014–2018 forecast by country and segment, says the market will grow from $2.3 billion in 2013 to $2.9 billion by the end of this year, reaching $6.8 billion in 2018. IDC’s figures represent a compound annual growth rate of 24.6 percent between now and 2018.

IDC splits Europe’s Big Data market into four segments: networking software, servers, storage and services. Of these, storage currently owns the lion’s share of the market, being valued at $536 million in 2013, followed by servers at $314 million.

Catching Up

“Western European organisations are catching up rapidly with their north American peers in terms of analytical maturity despite later adoption,” said IDC in a statement.

IDC says it sees a correlation between better organizational performance and greater use of Big Data analytics. However, it notes the shift from analytics to Big Data creates its own problems that make it difficult for organizations to gain value.

“Value from big data is far from guaranteed,” admitted IDC’s research director Alys Woodward. To counter this, Woodward suggests vendors do more to help their customers build Big Data systems that are tailored to meet their specific needs.

As far as general adoption goes, IDC expects compound annual growth rates for individual countries in Western Europe to range between 22.3 percent and 32.2 percent. Factors driving adoption include the extent of existing analytics in use and macroeconomics.

“The UK, Benelux and Nordics tend to show higher initial adoption, though Germany and France are catching up rapidly, while southern Europe still lags behind,” IDC said.

As a final note, IDS said future Hadoop-related investments would likely focus on buying services, with the arrival of smaller, independent vendors set to boost adoption of Big Data technologies beyond large enterprises.

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