Derrick Harris posted about IDC, who finally released a Big Data market sizing report.

The headline from the post is “IDC says big data will be $24B market in 2016; I say it’s bigger.”

Research firm IDC is predicting a big data market that will grow revenue at 31.7 percent a year until it hits the $23.8 billion mark in 2016. That’s a big number for a relatively new market, but it only tells part of the story of where big data technology will make money.

See all CES coverage here!

Defining “big data” isn’t always an easy task, and breaking it out into a group of separate technologies might not be either. While this report appears to subsume a May 2012 report from IDC predicting an $813 million Hadoop market, it certainly doesn’t include the market for analytics software. In July, IDC predicted that market — which is a critical piece of the overall big data picture — would hit $51 billion by 2016. (Heck, IBM’s Steve Mills said he expects IBM to do $15 billion in analytics revenue itself by 2015.)

I generally like Derrick’s work, but he’s totally ignoring (or nicking?) the good work that Jeff Kelly did earlier in 2012 on the Big Data market sizing report. Originally published in Februrary, and updated in November of last year, it put the Big Data market at $53.4 in 2016.

See all CES coverage here!

From Jeff’s report:

As of early 2012, the Big Data market stands at just over $5 billion based on related software, hardware, and services revenue. Increased interest in and awareness of the power of Big Data and related analytic capabilities to gain competitive advantage and to improve operational efficiencies, coupled with developments in the technologies and services that make Big Data a practical reality, will result in a super-charged CAGR of 58% between now and 2017.

As explained in our Big Data Manifesto, Big Data is the new definitive source of competitive advantage across all industries. For those organizations that understand and embrace the new reality of Big Data, the possibilities for new innovation, improved agility, and increased profitability are nearly endless.

I talked to Jeff Kelly today, who says that they’re working currently on the 2013 version of the market sizing report, and it’s due out at the end of the month.

He told me today that they stand by the near term overall numbers, and that the long range forecast of $53.4 billion will likely be revised upward, but didn’t give a specific figure.

SiliconANGLE and Wikibon have been all over Big Data from the origins of the movement (having incubated our company inside of Cloudera’s office space in Palo Alto for the first couple years we were around and covered nearly every major Big Data event with #theCube), so it’s nice to see market validation from older publications like GigaOM and well known research firms like IDC as they chime in on the big data movement.