A recent Wikibon report included a forecast about the future of the big data market as a whole, including revenue from all products and services that tie in with this area. The research firm believes that by 2017 big data will be worth a total of $53.4 billion, more than ten times its value in 2012.

This industry breaks down across a number of segments, and Hadoop is one of the most significant. This week IDC released an outlook of its own for the Hadoop-MapReduce ecosystem, which concludes that we’ll probably be seeing tenfold growth in this field as well.

The study expects a compounded annual growth rate of just over 60 percent to take Hadoop from the $77 million generated in 2011 to $812.8 million in 2016.

“The Hadoop and MapReduce market will likely develop along the lines established by the development of the Linux ecosystem,” says Dan Vesset, vice president, Business Analytics Solutions at IDC. “Over the next decade, much of the revenue will be accrued by hardware, applications, and application development and deployment software vendors – both established IT providers and start-up, which in aggregate have raised more than $300 million in venture capital funding.”

IDC credits Hadoop’s momentum in the coming years to the sheer size of the opportunity that comes along rapid adoption, and alongside that the increasing amount of competition.

These two reasons are exactly why some of the biggest IT vendors out there are looking to get a head start with their own big data solutions.  IBM’s been on a buying spree, acquiring consumer analytics firm Tealeaf less than a week ago.  And a few days later we learned that Cisco bought out another big data company called Truviso.  The latter makes software to analyze networking environments.