Big Deals for Big Data

The Big Data analytics space is growing so rapidly and in such unexpected new directions that its difficult to imagine what the landscape will look like in a few years. The need for organizations to process enormous volumes of data collected through social media and other sources is forcing massive change across just about every industry. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created and 90% of the data in the world today was created within the past two years.

In the 1990s, organizations tried to understand what a “data warehouse” was and how to build and manage different kinds of systems. By the end of the 1990s, “data warehousing” became “business intelligence” and now BI is often being used interchangeably with Big Data. No matter what the label, the challenges are familiar – the ever-growing need to capture, store, search, share, analyze, and visualize larger and larger datasets and create meaningful, actionable intelligence. Whether you use Big Data to improve knowledge of your customer, combat crime, fight diseases and prevent the next financial crisis, Big Data is leading to transformational change.

We believe investment in the Big Data space will continue to grow rapidly as industries swiftly adopt new technologies to harness the enormous volumes of data pouring into their organizations and drive decision making. We see fantastic M&A opportunities for solutions with robust technology, allowing data to be processed in a distributed fashion requiring massive parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers. We believe M&A market will see a dramatic uptick – with the larger vendors looking to acquire smaller companies that provide innovative algorithms and tools to manage new data sets. With such notable deals as IBM acquiring i2, HP acquiring Autonomy and Oracle acquiring Endeca, there is likely to be much more M&A activity in the near future. Whether you believe the Hadoopla or not, we believe that the Big Data landscape is about to undergo enormous change – and lead to big investment opportunities.