Market watcher Gartner claims big data will account for $28 billion of worldwide IT spending this year, as businesses strive to extract value from databases and social networks.
At present, most of the money spent on big data is being used to adapt legacy systems to cope with the deluge of information they receive.
"Despite the hype, big data is not a distinct, stand-alone market, but represents an industry-wide market force which must be addressed in products, practices and solution delivery," said Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner.
The market watcher claims that, by 2015, big data analytics will be routinely used by businesses.
"By 2020, big data features and functionality will be non-differentiating and routinely expected from traditional enterprise vendors and part of their product offerings," said Beyer.
"As a result, big data will become 'just data' by 2020 and architectural approaches, infrastructure and hardware/software that does not adapt to this 'new normal' will be retired."
