Led by newer kinds of databases and software for distributed storage and computing, the Big Data market is set to grow at three times the rate of the entire technology market, according to a new report from Forrester Research Inc.

Forrester’s report, “Big Data Management Solutions Forecast 2016 to 2021,” which the analyst firm claims is the first of its kind, divvies up the Big Data market into six separate chunks – namely, enterprise data warehousing, NoSQL, Hadoop, big data integration, data virtualization and in-memory data fabric. Of these, it reckons that Hadoop, NoSQL and in-memory data fabric are expected to see the most significant growth in the next six years.

Hadoop and NoSQL are familiar beasts, and Forrester reckons the two segments will see growth of 32.9 percent and 25 percent per year, respectively. In-memory data fabric refers to a product offering that combines data, compute and service grids with an in-memory database. Forrester reckons the segment will grow at a rate of 29.2 percent annually over the next five years.

Forrester also takes a look at industry usage in its report. Although finance, government, professional services and telecommunications industries are the biggest users of these technologies at present, the pharmaceutical, primary production and transportation industries will see the fastest growth over the forecast period. The analyst firm said that 40 percent of the companies it polled are already implementing and expanding their Big Data technology adoption, while 30 percent plan to step up their usage within the next year.

Forrester’s take on the NoSQL segment appears to be at odds with a recent report from rival analyst firm Gartner Inc., which said in an April report on database management systems that there’s “still not much to write home about” for leading vendors such as Basho Technologies Inc., Couchbase Inc., Datastax Inc., MarkLogic Corp. and MongoDB Inc. in terms of revenue – particularly when compared with relational database vendors such as Oracle Corp.

But the NoSQL vendors themselves paint a different picture. In an interview with SiliconANGLE last year, Basho Technologies’ Chief Executive Adam Wray said his company could go cash flow positive this year if it wanted to, though it was choosing to take a longer-term view and invest in things such as research and development instead. And just last March, Couchbase landed a $30 million series F funding round that company CEO Bob Wiederhold told the Wall Street Journal would help to make the company “cash positive” ahead of an IPO “in the not too distant future,” without giving an exact date.

No doubt, the NoSQL vendors will be receptive to Forrester’s forecast that their efforts are finally set to pay off.

“The complexity and richness of data is changing, along with exploding data volume and velocity. Unstructured data, such as text, tweets, graphs, and video, is an increasingly important source of information,” wrote Jennifer Adams, Forrester senior forecast analyst in a blog post. “Not surprisingly, we expect non-relational databases to be the fastest growing sector within big data management solutions.”

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