3 Areas Big Data is Booming for COTS Vendors

by Stephanie Meloni, Senior Analyst

Big data and analytics is predicted to be a hot spot in terms of budget growth in the federal IT market. According to a recent report from the Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, the government’s principal statistical agencies spend on average 2.3 billion dollars a year gathering, processing, and disseminating data. Based on internal analysis conducted by the immixGroup Market Intelligence team, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of big data and analytics is estimated at 5.85% from FY14-FY17. This is due to the fact government will need to rely more on data analytics as a way to achieve their mission — with reduced budgets and staff.

Following in the footpath of some early adopters, the rest of the federal government is beginning to make investments and use big data analytics. The interest in using big data analytics for more and more applications keeps growing exponentially. For COTS vendors outside of analytics tools, big data and analytics offers many more opportunities.

Here are three other areas vendors should consider:

1. Security
   This means not only protecting the data itself, but ties in with cybersecurity, which remains a high priority across the government. The government needs products that can help them predict insider threats and provide proactive intelligence on who’s using customer networks for situational awareness and predictive analytics to be able to more accurately defend their networks. This is a perfect example of the government needing to rely more heavily on its data as a way to accomplish their mission with less money, and they need COTS to help with this.

2. Infrastructure and Storage
   Big Data requires a new approach to storage and network bandwidth. Government agencies struggle with managing their data on a larger scale, and are often times dealing with dispersed storage infrastructures. To combat storage limitations, customers are looking to converged or unified infrastructures as well as cloud solutions — allowing for needed bandwidth, data access, and cost savings; COTS vendors can assist government in this area with products that can integrate data from stove piped systems — which may have been how the systems were built — but the government needs databases and systems to interoperate effectively.

3. Data Management
   The government will need big data solutions centered on the following requirements: making data accessible over various databases, breaking the data down into meta data, and tagging data to make it less complex and easier to analyze. Data quality also becomes important in order for agencies to make sure they’re using the right data sets; in order to ensure this, agencies must sort data to see what should be kept and classified, and what can be disposed. Data cleansing is a timely and costly process for the government; they want their analysts to be able to focus on the actual analysis aspect of their job, and this is one area where COTS products can help them do their job better.

If you’d like to hear more about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for implementing government big data and analytics solutions, please join us for our Government IT Sales Summit on November 20th. In our session “Lots and Lots of Data- Now What?” you’ll understand how government would like to collaborate with industry partners to implement best-of-breed solutions. Also at the Summit, the Market Intelligence team will identify and explain targeted sales opportunities for COTS manufacturers and solution providers and discuss how to navigate the complex waters of DOD. Topics will include: DOD IT budgets, organizational landscapes, major acquisition drivers, and FY15 programs.