Big data: What's all the fuss about?

Big data: it’s a term that almost everyone will have heard of, but why should business buyers take note?

To start with a brief definition, this latest technology buzz phrase relates to the exponential growth in the amount of data that is being generated, stored and analysed. Both individuals and everyday devices leave behind a data trail, which is becoming a gold mine for both private and public sector organisations – cheaper storage solutions and the availability of greater compute power via the cloud means that these massive data sets, which were previously too large to make sense of, can now be dissected and transformed into valuable insights.

For business buyers, it would be foolish to ignore a technological trend that is transforming the IT and digital world, especially as it is promising huge opportunities for those able to capitalise on it. Indeed, it is predicted that the global big data market will be 44 times larger in 2020 than it was in 2009. Furthermore, it has been said that big data could be worth £216 million to the UK economy over the next five years.

As big data has established itself as a mainstream business technology over the past 24 months, there is massive demand for a wide variety of products and services that can turn petabytes into competitive advantage.

The most obvious area is data analytics. Importantly, not only are the tools for crunching numbers highly sought after, but the people who can do it are also on the wish-list of many businesses; the fabled ‘data scientist’ is to 2014 what the web developer was during the dotcom boom. This is the person who can take data and make sense of it to give a company competitive advantage.

Research shows that the economy has driven a need for 69,000 additional big data specialists over the period 2012-2017, with 60 per cent of businesses already struggling to hire people with data science skills. The point? If people cannot hire in-house experts to unlock the value that is sitting within huge data sets then they are going to look to employ the services of a company who can.

There are countless innovative start-ups that have created cloud-hosted software for analysing big data, many of which operate in the ‘Tech City’ area in east London. They can offer the platform for companies, with or without a data scientist, to analyse and visualise big data. Crucially, these technology solutions are often targeted at particular verticals.

For business buyers this points to big opportunities – whether already operating in the technology sector or providing services to sectors like retail, healthcare or financial services, obtaining big data capabilities through a merger or acquisition could open the door to huge profits.

It might be a competitive market but it is one that is guaranteed to grow over the coming years – the big data bandwagon is one that business buyers ought to consider jumping onto, and quickly.

If you are considering a making an acquisition this year, take a look at our latest businesses for sale to get an idea of medium sized businesses on the market.

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