by Angela Guess

Forbes contributor Bernard Marr recently wrote, “We’ve had software as a service, platform as a service and data as a service. Now, by mixing them all together and massively upscaling the amount of data involved, we’ve arrived at Big Data as a Service (or BDaaS, and it’s pronounced how you will). It might not be a term you’re familiar with yet, but it suitably describes a fast-growing new market. In the last few years many businesses have sprung up offering cloud-based Big Data services to help other companies and organizations solve their data dilemmas. Some estimate that the portion of business IT spending that is cloud-based, x-as-a-service activity will increase from about 15% today to 35% by 2021. Given that it is estimated that the global Big Data market will be worth $88 billion by that point, we can see that the forecast value of the BDaaS market could be $30 billion.”

Marr continues, “At the moment, BDaaS is a somewhat nebulous term often used to describe a wide variety of outsourcing of various Big Data functions to the cloud. This can range from the supply of data, to the supply of analytical tools with which to interrogate the data (often through a web dashboard or control panel) to carrying out the actual analysis and providing reports. Some BDaaS providers also include consulting and advisory services within their BDaaS packages. There are several advantages to outsourcing or virtualizing your analytics activities involving large datasets.”

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photo credit: Flickr/ Alexandru llie 2012