The big data market looks set to be worth over 50 billion dollars by 2017, up from just 5 billion today, according to research from technology research and advisory community Wikibon. In 2011, the market leaders in the field of big data, by revenue, were familiar names including IBM, Intel, HP and Oracle, with Microsoft down at 23rd place. The split of big data spending is between services (44%), hardware (31%), and software (25%).

Big data adds levels of complexity that require new skills. Typical organised data, such as that from an ERP or CRM, may fall into the gigabytes of size but big data really starts to climb when meta data is added. This meta data can be from a wide array of areas including social networking services, data feeds, and service logs but also from other analytical sources such as sentiment analysis, sensors, RFID tags, and click streams (for example clicks through a website).