Big Data Spending Trends: What Agencies are Spending on Software Solutions
Published: October 15, 2014
Big DataForecasts and SpendingInnovationSequestration
Finding hard data on the federal big data market is difficult. This week’s post takes a look at federal spending on big data related software solutions over the period from FY 2010-2014. The data presented is derived from a collection put together by Deltek GovWin’s Federal Industry Analysis team for a forthcoming report on trends in federal cloud computing, big data, data center consolidation, and mobility adoption.
In October 2013 Deltek GovWin’s Federal Industry Analysis team began publishing an annual report that delves into the progress federal agencies are making toward reaching a specific set of information technology goals. The areas examined are cloud computing, data center consolidation, big data, and mobility. Cloud and big data are my areas of responsibility and expertise so in this week’s post I’ll provide a small sample of the data that we analyze in the report. The data details spending related to big data investment in both the civilian and defense sectors of the federal government. Collection of the data is based on a set of 69 keywords relevant to big data investments. These keywords range from the names of specific solutions (e.g., Sqrrl, Splunk, and Hadoop) to types of products and services (e.g., fusion centers, high performance computing, and predictive analytics). The resulting dataset is therefore discreet, constituting a narrowed-down picture of federal big data investment. It doesn’t capture all investment as that would be impossible given a lack of granularity in the government data, security clearance issues, and all of the spending that takes place as part of large-scale IT services efforts. What the data does provide, however, is a baseline by which to analyze and understand agency investment trends.