Australian enterprises are boosting big data analytics capability by investing more in tools and services, in a bid to bolster business processes and create new products and services.
According Telsyte findings, local demand for high volume data processing and real-time intelligence is growing strongly as organisations struggle to keep up with an explosion of data.
As explained through the Telsyte maturity model - which classifies the market into the maturity levels of static, active, tactical, strategic, dynamic and optimised - most (63 per cent) enterprises are at a low maturity level.
However, the rate of organisations with “strategic” to “optimised” big data maturity has risen sharply during the past two years.
Budgets are increasing with 83 per cent of Australian CIOs planning to invest more on big data in 2017, including hardware, software and services.
“Intention to use big data analytics are high across a range of applications, including: financial modelling; customer interaction; security and fraud detection; retail sales and e-commerce; and IoT and machine-to-machine infrastructure,” Telsyte Senior Analyst, Rodney Gedda, said.
Gedda said that around a third of CIOs are looking to use big data analytics for sales and marketing applications, making it in the top three of line of business use cases.
However, uptake is still lagging with only 15 per cent of marketing departments having implemented big data analytics.
Big data analytics now firmly on the software agenda
According to Gedda, big data and associated analytics is now in the same league as CRM and marketing automation for share of software budget, indicating its strategic relevance across a growing number of data sources, not just traditional databases.
Specifically, some 30 per cent of enterprises are using or planning to use big data for predictive analytics, indicating a strong requirement for these use cases.
Furthermore, big data analytics is now in top five of enterprises applications managed by third-party service providers indicating a lack of in-house capability to process large data sets.
Telsyte research shows more than half of Australian CIOs predict a five or more fold increase in the number of connected devices in their enterprise within the next five years.
And a lack of a big data strategy is a blocker for IoT adoption in one in four organisations.
“Just collecting and processing data is half the story,” Gedda added. “Australian business leaders must use real-time analytics to gain business value from data and transform their decision making from reactive to proactive.”
For Gedda, the main benefits CIOs are looking to derive from a big data and analytics strategy are better productivity, improved decision making and better product and service development which is now the number one business priority for Australian IT leaders.
Delving deeper, Telsyte research investigated the main barriers to the adoption of big data among Australian enterprises and factors like software costs, lack of in-house skills and IT infrastructure requirements are holding back broader adoption across the country.
Meanwhile, big data processing is already the number one use-case for high-performance computing and analytics and reporting is in the top five.
Big data managed services high on agenda in Australia
The Australian market for big data and analytics support partners is growing strong with global players like IBM, Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, Dell/EMC, Google, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle all vying for a slice of the boom in spending by buyers of big data.
Telsyte research found platforms and managed services top of the shopping lists for organisations embracing big data.
In addition to the multinational options Australia has a growing big data analytics industry with vendors like Contexti, EngineRoom.io and YellowFin offering a range of products and services in the space.
“The local big data services space remains ripe for consolidation with a number of service providers growing quickly in the past 12 months,” Telsyte Managing Director, Foad Fadaghi, added.
