It’s that time of the year again!

The New Year is here and technologists all over the world are looking for another year of opportunities that would let them break barriers, open avenues and march strides toward achieving the next-big-thing. For over a decade, the field of data science has been seeing tremendous growth as enterprises store and analyze petabytes of data every single day.

While 2016 saw the growth of Hadoop as a “core part of the enterprise IT landscape”, accelerated growth of self-servicing data preparation tools and the evolved role of Internet of Things in cloud and data analytics in general, this year experts foresee promising opportunities that could take the industry to play a much greater role in Predictive Analytics, Data Visualization and cloud-based applications.

Here are some of the top trends that data experts believe would define the year and would set the narrative for the future of the industry in the coming times.

Big Data and Bigger Transformations

James Kobieu, a renowned Big Data evangelist from IBM, has predicted the transformation of the key stake holders of Big Data & Analytics Ecosystem by defining their roles in 2017. He believes that it would become necessary for traditional programmers to gain competence in data science in order to stay relevant; data scientists on the other hand would be working more closely with “integrated and multi-disciplinary cloud-based development environments”.

In terms of organizational transformations, Kobieu differentiates the growth potential for high-priority and disruptive enterprise applications and directs the former towards artificial intelligence, machine learning and the latter towards embedded deep learning, cognitive IoT, autonomous vehicles, robotic cognition etc.

Conundrum around Hadoop

Another popular expectation that experts have for 2017 is the further expansion and adaption of Hadoop-based data structuring and processing solutions. Whether it is software, hardware or service-based Hadoop offering, the market is expected to implode with a CAGR of 54.9% through 2017 and the package’s overall worth is expected to raise about $13.9 billion this year.

In spite of such positive reception in the market, Tableau- the leading data visualization and business analytics organization has observed that enterprises cannot rely on just Hadoop-based data sources to quench their data analytics need. They believe that platforms that are “data and source-agnostic” are most likely to thrive in the market.

Data as Organizational Asset

The rising trend of valuable user data as one of the primary components as any organizational structure is not new. But what’s trending now is the way data, its value and the proprietorial rights surrounding it would be projected as an essential organizational asset.

Gartner takes this a step further by proposing that by 2019, 90% of the organizations will have a Chief Data Officer (CDO) whose job would involve laying out “information strategies” that would minimize the risks and maximize the worthiness out of every byte of data stored, processed and utilized with an organization. However, Gartner also warns that only 50% of the CDOs would be actually considered a success as the balancing act between business and IT would become increasingly difficult.

Thus 2017 can be the year where the market can see many organizations, irrespective of their size and geographies, to further their understanding of data as an organizational asset and start nurturing able CDOs.

Increased Data Movement to Cloud

With the rise and rise of Cloud-based technologies, the acceleration in porting organizational data to cloud would arguably be the most predictable trend of the year.  The recently concluded IDG’s Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey, 2016 has projected that business/data analytics and data storage/management would lead the cloud adoption drive among organizations across the world by contributing 43% to the movement.

Among the organizations that responded to the survey, the predictions for cloud migration of business/data analytics and data storage/management applications were found to be 22% and 21% respectively.  The following chart gives the detailed split of cloud-migration data as per the business area.

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All in One, One in All

The galloping trend of increasing smart phone users across the world will nudge organizations to seek integrated data management techniques that combine IoT, Big Data, Cloud and Cyber security. Experts believe that this year will pave way to further bridge the gap between gathering user data and deploying them as meaningful results for enterprises to offer more seamless experience to their customers. The growing level of consciousness around data and its presentation will eventually bring in drastic growth in data visualization techniques as well.

Irrespective of the industrial scope, in 2016, the top big data and analytics trends focused on how enterprises can collect, store, consume and create meaningful data patterns. It is therefore safe to say that 2017 would bring in promises to the world of business analytics by being more poised than ever to transform Customer Experience metrics to a whole new level.

 

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