Big data and analytics-related services continue to gain traction among local businesses, with the Asia Pacific excluding Japan market expected to grow from $3.8 billion to $7 billion in 2019 at a 16.3% CAGR, according to IDC.
Driven by the growing demand for analytics-related systems integration and BPO services, IDC research reveals that 53% of organizations in the APEJ region consider big data and analytics important and have adopted or plans to adopt it in the near future.
Sherrel Roche, IT services senior market analyst at IDC Asia Pacific, says enterprises are overwhelmed with massive amounts of data, and additionally, mobility and Internet of Things (IoT) are adding to this exponential growth and complexity.
“This in turn is facilitating enterprises to relook at their big data and analytics strategy and leverage the growing data to make quick and right decisions to achieve business goals,” Roche comments.
Roche says because enterprises have generated, collected, and stored vast amounts of data for years, they are currently interested in analyzing this data to drive business innovation.
However, enterprises in APEJ are still in the early stages of big data and analytics adoption due to the lack of trained professionals and data science skills.
Despite this, Roche believes that there are massive amount of services opportunities due to the growing awareness about BDA technology – not to mention the push of various governments on smart cities, which all have strong BDA components.
Moving forward, there will be growing interest seen in cloud-based delivery of business analytics services, security analytics services and predictive analytics.
“Majority of the enterprises in the region prefer to manage big data and analytics services in-house as the complexity of BDA technologies is turning off end-users,” adds Roche.
However, the research also reveals that enterprises that engage with external services providers prefer partnering with independent software vendors (ISVs), and outsourcing services providers for big data and analytics professional services.
As such IDC believes that ISV’s and management consultant SP’s need to take the lead role and drive industry-specific BDA solutions.
"One in three organizations in the region find it difficult to build business case or measure ROI while leveraging BDA solutions, and we see organizations are becoming more pragmatic in justifying business cases and starting small in their BDA journey," comments Qiao Li, senior market analyst for big data and analytics at IDC Asia Pacific.
"ISVs and consulting service providers, need to partner with organizations to identify appropriate use cases and relevant data sources to drive faster and quantifiable benefits in BDA initiatives."