The market for Big Data in the public cloud will grow from last year’s $1.1 billion (5 percent of all Big Data revenue) to $21.8 billion (24 percent of all Big Data revenue) by 2026 according to the latest Wikibon analysis. Big Data contributed 1.4 percent of total public cloud revenue in 2015. That will grow to 4.4 percent by 2016.

The comparative simplicity and flexible scaling of running Big Data analysis in the cloud will attract corporate users, and Wikibon Analyst Ralph Finos, Ph.D., recommends that they should explore options. However, Dr. Finos wrote in his recent analysis of the “Wikibon Big Data in the Public Cloud Forecast 2016,”  moving large volumes of data over distance “remains an intractable cost.” This will limit the market mainly to data that is already in the cloud.

In interviews, Big Data software vendors said their public-cloud software revenues doubled in 2015 and they expect similar growth in 2016. Big Data apps will gain a growing share of the overall Big Data spend, with growth coming mostly from marketing, advertising technology, social and business networks, mobile and similar apps. However, despite this high growth, Big Data’s share of the public cloud is small and will remain so through the next decade. This, Finos wrote, is largely because no full-scale software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps in Big Data today compare to the traction and market power of Salesforce.com Inc., Oracle and SAP SE.

The full report, available to Wikibon subscribers, discusses the issues and advantages of Big Data in the cloud and the forces driving this part of the Big Data market. It discusses the three waves of Big Data cloud application development that Wikibon foresees and how the big data application pattern mix in the public cloud will evolve through the next decade. Finos outlines a strategy for organizations navigating the complex waters of Big Data strategy.

This Research Alert is one piece in Wikibon’s in-depth coverage of the evolution of Big Data technology and markets that includes in-depth coverage of associated conferences and live interviews of key players and users on theCUBE with analysis from the Wikibon team, including Analyst George Gilbert and CTO David Floyer. This analysis is available by subscription at Wikibon.com.

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