Big Data is NOW.  It is not something that will benefit the enterprise in the future it’s already benefiting it today.  From the energy to healthcare industries, airline and finance, Big Data is helping people figure out what to do with huge amounts of information in order to benefit their respective sectors.

And all this has been possible via emerging technologies such as Hadoop that has enabled big companies to get a piece of the Big Data action.

Wikibon, the first analyst firm to publish  a comprehensive Big Data market report, has been a strong believer in Big Data from the very start.  Earlier this year the research firm published  Wikibon’s Big Data Vendor Revenue and Market Forecast 2012-2017 which provides figures regarding revenue acquired by vendors based on Big Data products and services.

And now, Wikibon presents us with the Real World of Big Data infographic.

“Our goal with the infographic is to communicate the real world applications of and revenue created by Big Data in the enterprise in a visually exciting way. You’ll notice a handful of Big Data uses cases, including dynamic price optimization at Sears, real-time marketing campaign analysis by Lyris and analytics to support drug discovery at Bristol Myers Squibb,” Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Jeff Kelly stated.

The infographic showed that by 2017, the Big Data industry will boom and will rake in XAAS revenue of $3.24 billion and the biggest growth drivers for Big Data are due to the increasing adoption of traditional enterprise, maturation of Big Data software, increasingly sophisticated professional services and continued investment of Web giants in Big Data Hardware.

Tech firms and beyond

Currently, the biggest investors in BIg Data infrastructure are Google who invested $3 billion last year, Facebook who shelled out more $1 billion for Big Data infrastructure that powers it social network, and the CIA which made a $600 million deal with AWS to build a private cloud infrastructure to help manage its Big Data demands.

Others investing in Big Data are not necessarily tech companies, either.  Bristol Myers Squibb invests in Big Data to support drug development, financial services such as JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America use Big Data to conduct fraud analysis and risk profiling, while those in the category of industrial internet use Big Data to create a living network of intelligent machines and systems.

As stated at the beginning of this article, Big Data is happening right now, and companies are utilizing its technology to improve their products and services.  Some of the notable Big Data practitioners include Sears which use it to dynamically update its product pricing, Lyris to provide near real-time feedback, Aetna to identify and predict potential ailment, and the University of Texas at Austin, which uses Big Data to detect security breaches in real-time.

But the biggest contributor to Big Data’s success is seen in application software.

App development driving big growth

“We think that Big Data application is increasingly going to become the area where real value is going to be delivered for Big Data.  The applications are where end users interact with Big Data.  They are getting insights from analytic applications, there could be web-based applications that are delivering recommendations and thanks to our consumers, any number of other applications.  And we think that space, that part of the market, is really going to play a crucial role in delivering business value for Big Data.,” Kelly stated in his Breaking Analysis at this morning’s NewsDesk with Kristin Feledy.

To know more about what’s happening now and the future of Big Data, check out the NewsDesk video and infographic below: