With increasing attention on the business side of tech innovation, the world seems to be awaiting the rise of the first billion-dollar Big Data company. A recent $50 million dollar investment from Hewlett-Packard (HP) put Hortonworks a step forward in its goal to go public. Cloudera is on pace to hit the $100 million revenue mark this year. However, during theCUBE’s kickoff coverage at the HP Vertica Big Data Conference last week, Jeff Kelly discussed with co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante why the first billionaire Big Data company may just be a practitioner.

Practitioners Creating Value

Kelly pointed out that, in his Big Data market forecast report, it was predicted the majority of the value in the Big Data market was going to come from practitioners, rather than vendors. He then said this sector is actually growing faster than anticipated, which isn’t surprising considering the current uses of data from practitioners and users conspiring new ways to gain value from their data. Additionally, Kelly thinks that the value that practitioners are creating from Big Data technologies and services is increasing at least as fast, if not faster, than that of vendors.

This growth also comes from both start-ups and traditional organizations. Start-ups, or companies born in the Cloud, use Big Data technologies and tools to create new business models. On the other hand, more traditional organizations are using Big Data for a variety of use cases. Some organizations that Kelly mentioned as examples were The United States Postal Service (USPS) using data to better compete in the marketplace and the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association conducting analytics from data coming off machines and wearable technologies.

First Billion-Dollar Big Data company may be unexpected

Kelly believes that the first-billion dollar company in Big Data might not be what you may think. It’s going to be a practitioner that may not necessarily be thought of as a Big Data company, but in fact uses data to drive its business, such as a gaming or social media company.

He also expects to see new companies emerging and perhaps even existing companies with different use cases that might not have been thought of before. “What’s going to happen is you’re going to have start-ups emerge. You’re going to have maybe some existing companies pivot and start to use data in ways that we never would’ve thought of, and that’s where you’re going to see the billion-dollar companies,” said Kelly.

In addition to believing that the first billion-dollar Big Data company is going to be a practitioner, Kelly also predicts that we’re going to actually see multiple companies reaching that billion-dollar status.

See all of Kelly’s predictions for the Big Data market in the full video below:

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