Big Data Is Key To Business survival. See How Much That Market Will Be Worth By 2019 And Africa’s Place In This Future

Big Data what’s shaping the future in tech and companies that have managed this effectively will continue to reap the benefits well in the future. According to IBM, a whopping 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day and with this comes big jobs as well. According to Gartner (a research and advisory firm in the United States), as much as 4.4 million IT jobs were to be created globally to support big data by 2015 with 1.9 million of them coming from the US alone. To understand why these jobs are necessary for business and important to businesses, Domo (a data visualisation company) provided an infograph that actually shows how data is being generated every single day across major tech platforms and this happens just among the currently estimated 3.2 billion people who have access to the internet.

Let’s get to it using YouTube for example. Three hundred hours of video is uploaded by users every minute and this doesn’t include the number of views per minute by users. YouTube released some data last year when it announced its Music app

• YouTube has over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.
• YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.
• The number of hours people spend watching videos (aka watch time) on YouTube is up 60% y/y, the fastest growth we’ve seen in 2 years.
• The number of people watching YouTube per day is up 40% y/y since March 2014.
• The number of users coming to YouTube who start at the YouTube homepage, similar to the way they might turn on their TV, is up more than 3x y/y.

In addition to the above we have the following;

So bringing this into the Big Data context, a business wants to a further breakdown by geography, economic conditions (consumer spending  figures), local policies (tax and privacy) among others. This data will eventually inform marketing and administrative decisions would affect output and sales positively or negatively. Individuals and companies who are capable of breaking down this deluge of daily data for companies to use will eventually reap big benefits as well.

An IDC (International Data Corporation) report says ” worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics will grow from nearly $122 billion in 2015 to more than $187 billion in 2019, an increase of more than 50% over the five-year forecast period….. with IT Services generating more than three times the annual revenues of Business Services. Software will be the second largest category, generating more than $55 billion in revenues in 2019. Nearly half of these revenues will come from purchases of End-User Query, Reporting, and Analysis Tools and Data Warehouse Management Tools. Hardware spending will grow to nearly $28 billion in 2019.”

By geographical locations though, the United States will be the biggest Big Data market with a potential to reach $98b by 2019 with Western Europe, Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) and Latin America following respectively. This not surprising because according to IDC, large companies with over 500 employees will rake in most of the Big Data revenue of $140b by 2019 and most of the companies with such capacity are based in more developed economies.

Very interestingly though is the fact that the report indentifies Latin America and the Middle East & Africa as the regions that will record the fastest growth.

So what’s the African Big Data story?

Africa is expected to play host to well over 320 million smartphones by the year 2017 and this figure will keep growing as smartphones get more affordable over time. This figure represents about 30% of the entire population of Africans in Africa. Nigeria and Ethiopia are expected to continue to lead this new digital drive as a direct result of their population in the area of mobile technology according to a report by the GSMA. This means more data for government institutions  and businesses alike which are eventually  going to want this “Big” Data analysts in the future for programs like crime fighting and other social activities. With this growing appetite for data on the continent, Microsoft is partnering with big companies and start ups across the continent to explore TV White Spaces for broadband service provision in remote areas of the African continent. Just recently in a partnership with Facebook, Microsoft announced that together they could be building subsea cables to cater for increased demand for online services. Microsoft and Facebook both represent two of the biggest businesses in the field with Microsoft leading the operating system space and Facebook being the clear leader by user base in the world. Facebook itself through its internet.org program is exploring the use of drones and Laser technology for internet service beaming to some of the poorest and remotest regions of the world of which Asia and Africa are key. There are over 100 million Africans on Facebook with over 15 million of that number coming from Nigeria alone and this is taking into account Twitter, Snapchat, BBM etc numbers. Companies want to know how to reach these people using parameters like gender, location, interests among others and this means these companies would require people with skills in this area because frankly speaking, no one wants to make an important business decision on false information which could have a lasting negative effect on their business. Ericsson is one company that has championed the cause of the Internet of Things (IoT) which comes down to Big Data in the end and in their mobile telecom and data report at the end of 2014, Asia and Africa will account for about 80% the smartphone use. This is all data that’s available already and as an analyst, you ought to know how to use this data to improve sales and how you interact with customers especially now when big tech companies are looking the way of Artificial Intelligence to make business more efficient. Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all announced Artificial Intelligence initiatives for services like chat and home assistant tools. Big Data analysis is already being used in health to cure or prevent diseases and IBM’s Watson is doing just that among in the health sector and others as well. Data is key but an abuse of this can also have devastating consequences as is common in this part of the world with impunity sometimes. Read my  report on this here

See more Big Data infograph below;

Editor’s note: It has come to our notice that a part of this story wasn’t published correctly yesterday. We have now updated the story to reflect changes especially to the last part of this article. Many thanks to you for bearing with us.