Bangalore: Big Data technology market will be big, really big in near future says a report published by IDC, a market research firm. The research firm has forecasted that by the year 2015 the market for Big Data technology and services will reach $16.9 billion, up from $3.2 billion in 2010. This accounts for a 40 percent growth rate per year that is seven times more than the estimated growth rate for the entire information technology and communication business, according to IDC reports Steve Lohr in nytimes.com

For those wondering what Big Data is all about? In information technology, big data consists of datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Lohr says that such type of exponential growth forecast have always been taken on a lighter note.

Big Data includes a number of technology advancements that have been harvested for years and are likely to yield beneficial results in coming years. These technology developments include rapid evolution of software tools, especially ones from the field of artificial intelligence, like machine learning and natural-language processing, explosion of data and new kinds of data, like from the Web and sensor streams and faster, cheaper and new kinds of hardware, like in-memory data processing.

“We’re just scratching the surface in terms of use cases,” said Benjamin Woo, an IDC analyst who worked on the report. “But a lot of them are going to be mash-ups of different kinds of data to deliver more intelligence to users.”

“We don’t really know yet what we’re going to discover with all this data,” Mr. Woo said.The IDC market forecast is implicitly making the case that Big Data is moving well beyond the “science project” phase, where a handful of companies did some pioneering work, to the commercial mainstream.