75% of Mid-Size to Large Businesses Implementing Big Data Solutions Within Next 12 Months

More than 75% of midsize to large businesses are implementing big-data-related solutions within the next 12 months – with customer care, marketing and sales departments increasingly driving demand, according to Microsoft Corp. research.

According to Microsoft’s Global Enterprise Big Data Trends: 2013 study of 282 IT decision-makers, the following trends emerged:

• Although the IT department (52%) is currently driving most of the demand for big data, customer care (41%), sales (26%), finance (23%) and marketing (23%) departments are increasingly driving demand.
• 17% of customers surveyed are in the early stages of researching big data solutions, whereas 13% have fully deployed them; nearly 90% of customers surveyed have a dedicated budget for addressing big data.
• Nearly half of customers (49%) reported that growth in the volume of data is the greatest challenge driving big data solution adoption, followed by having to integrate disparate business intelligence tools (41%) and having tools able to glean the insight (40%).

The company published its findings to the Microsoft News Center, kicking off a week of announcements focused on the company’s big data customers, products and future investments.

"Big data can be large tables of structured data, huge files of complex unstructured data, or small amounts of machine-generated data that pile up faster than you can make sense of it," said Eron Kelly, GM of SQL Server at Microsoft. "Microsoft’s goal is to help everyone make better, faster decisions by providing tools that make it easy to find insights in big data, small data … any data."

Big data is changing the way organizations and people do business, discover insights and interact with one another.