2016: The year that will see bigger applications of big data

Analysts feel that the adoption of big data technologies is bound to increase in 2016. Big data will see the biggest growth in the public sector, telecom, banking, financial services, retail, among other verticals.

There are several uses cases that Malay Shah, Director, Advisory Services, Technology practice at EY, feels will see a better outcome in 2016 such as detecting security threats, prediction of health outcomes, creating new product offering, understanding customer’s online activities, adding social connector information for customers, and performing text analytics to solve customer support issues.

“As big data becomes the new normal, information and analytics leaders are shifting focus from hype to value. While the perennial challenge of understanding value remains, the practical challenges of skills, governance, funding and ROI come to the fore,” said Bhavish Sood, Research Director, Gartner.

He also said that several newer technologies will also come into the spotlight such as analytics marketplaces and smart data discovery tools.

“These technologies promise to deliver better productivity for data scientists and to improve the creation and deployment of advanced analytics. This is a critical development because, while most of the core data science technologies have been around for decades, one of their main barriers to adoption was a lack of available skills rather than any lack of maturity in the technology itself,” he added.

EY has also made the following big data prediction in 2016:

Increased adoption of visualization tools such as Tableau in 2016Increase in popularity of analytics and big data in cloud with services like Amazon RedshiftIncreased adoption of NoSQL technologies in enterprisesPredictive technologies will become commonplace like ETL in yesteryears. Some acquisition from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM expected as they defend their traditional businessesData councils will become a norm in organizations trying to establish data as a competency

If we circle the globe, we find that countries in the Asia Pacific region see big data and analytics to have the greatest impact in driving business transformation, according to KPMG’s 2015 Global Technology Innovation Survey.

In 2016, it is also expected that there will be an increased use of sensors across various industries leading to developments in big data, said Audrey William, head of ICT research Frost & Sullivan A/NZ, in a company blog post.

“We are starting to see sensors being embedded in physical objects ranging from medical devices, wearable, highways, cars, industrial machines to mobile phones and these are then linked to very high speed and powerful networks. The volumes of data generated will lead to a huge repository of data,” she added.

Coming back home, 2016 will be the year where government-led initiatives such as Digital and Make in India are expected to take off. The government along with enterprises will work to getting these goals in place—all of this will cause an explosion of data. With this explosion and the fact that currently less than 0.5 percent of all data around the world is ever analysed and used, one can only imagine what big data has in store for enterprises if they use this data to its maximum.