The Federal Big Data Market is Evolving. Where to Find Future Growth?
Big Data is with us here and now, but what shape is the market taking and where will the growth be in the future?
With Big Data almost constantly in the press nowadays, a lot of questions are arising about what elements of the federal “Big Data market” might be in the years ahead. Understanding where the opportunity lies is critical for vendors hoping to take advantage of the spending that the hype machine says is coming. Readers will forgive the primer when I note that the term Big Data describes little more than the state of exploding unstructured data across the private and public sectors. In this sense, Big Data is in many ways not so much about emerging technology as it is about enabling data management, understanding data usage, and understanding the business need to be fulfilled by analyzing the data.
Data Storage and Management
Mature IT environments are no longer just about providing capabilities to users, they are also about the data being generated by a large and growing number of touch points across networks. Along with their private sector counterparts, federal agencies are faced with the fundamental challenge of managing that data as efficiently as possible. This is not a new challenge, as agencies have in the past responded to their proliferating data by implementing enterprise data warehouses, tagging data, and storing it in metadata registries. The basic infrastructure for managing data already exists, therefore, although in many cases that infrastructure may be inadequate given the volume of data being accumulated and the intended uses of the data.
Providing federal customers with upgraded storage capacity that will enable more efficient access to and manipulation of data is thus anticipated to be an area of growth in the years to come. This demand for storage likely will continue to sustain the storage hardware market, but we should also expect to see strong demand for cloud-based storage.
Identifying Business Need and Data Analysis
Once an agency has chosen a storage solution, the next challenge it faces is understanding what stakeholders want to learn from the stored data and from the incoming torrent of new data. There are two basic components to this challenge that I can see currently. I present these sequentially, but these processes often occur simultaneously.
First, agencies will need to clarify the business need served by handling the data. Is the agency seeking to leverage its data for performance reporting, or is it using data to identify cyber threats, or is it trying to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse? Then, once the business need has been identified, the customer will need to develop a structuring strategy to address that need.
Helping agencies understand their business needs and then helping them structure their data accordingly to meet those needs are additional areas of opportunity for vendors. In the first instance agencies may require consulting expertise in order to help them determine a smart data management and analysis strategy. Federal customers will then require the tools necessary to implement the strategy they settle upon. These tools may include servers to ensure that the analytical system performs as efficiently as possible, but buying new servers is not necessarily required if an optimized IT infrastructure is present.
Procuring advanced analytical applications, on the other hand, is absolutely required in order to perform the analysis necessary to achieve the desired business goal, so the purchase of analytics software is a likely growth area.
The question is, how will agencies buy these solutions? Multiple procurement approaches and solutions are available, ranging from one-off data analytics applications and combined hardware/software solutions, to increasingly popular cloud-based SaaS solutions. One thing to consider in this context is the fact that analytics tools are often included as part of enterprise application suites. DISA, for example, recently acquired a BMC/Remedy IT Service Management (ITSM) application suite with analytics capabilities that it is using to facilitate reporting requirements for the Computing Services Division. This suite is a SaaS data analytics capability. Other kinds of systems, including Enterprise Resource Planning systems and Business intelligence programs, also provide analytics capabilities.
So, are these solutions part of the “Big Data” market? Probably not, but I believe this is a question federal customers will be asking industry in years to come. In addition, if a federal customer already has a BI solution in place they may wonder why it is that system needs to be replaced by the latest data analytics program. My point here is that with the confusion surrounding Big Data and with so many analytical capabilities already available as part of enterprise software suites, federal customers are going to want to know why they should replace or upgrade what they already have if that system has been working. This will become an increasingly important question to answer for them as IT budgets shrink.
Big Data is Here and Now
If I have made anything clear in this piece, I hope it is the understanding that Big Data is with us here and now. Most federal agencies are already using analytical tools in at least some capacity, although there is plenty of space for growth. Similarly, agencies are already in the process of consolidating and optimizing their IT infrastructures and adding storage capacity. As migration to the cloud accelerates even more agency customers will be asking cloud service providers for advanced analytical solutions. Potential future opportunities will exist in consulting, data storage, and analytics applications, either inside the cloud or not.
Some of these solutions are being procured today. Then there are agencies like DISA that are adding enterprise analytics capabilities which ease them into the era of Big Data without necessarily calling it Big Data. We are seeing the market evolve before our eyes as the pieces fall into place that can enable more efficient data management and analysis capabilities, so do not be fooled that Big Data is something yet to come. I suspect being successful in the embryonic federal Big Data market will require keeping a close eye on these evolving approaches and not necessarily on waiting for large opportunities advertized as "Big Data" to appear in conference presentations or on Federal Business Opportunities.
There are no comments for this entry.
[Add Comment]