According to IDC big data-related server shipments are to increase from 6% of all servers shipped in EMEA in 2015 to 16% by 2019, with server values growing from $1 billion in 2015 to $2.7bn by 2019.
Big data storage capacity is also on the increase-- the analyst forecasts it will reach 20 exabytes by 2019, with $2.7bn value. Storage capacity totals 764 petabytes in 2015 (with the majority being external storage), while shipments of servers for big data purpose amount to 134000 during the year.
IDC adds that while most big data projects start in private datacentres, an increasing number of companies is moving analytics workloads to the public cloud, even if sensitive data remains on-premise for compliance reasons. As a result the public cloud infrastructure share of big data workloads is set to increase from 13% of 2015 server shipments to 34% in 2019, and storage capacity deployed on public clouds will increase from 25% of big data workloads in 2015 to 55% in 2019.
"Big data and analytics have risen to the top of executives' and developers' agendas as the technology has evolved and mindsets are starting to change in organisations in EMEA," IDC says. "The main challenge is not the data or its volume, but the ability to generate value from it. Many customers are still at the beginning of their journey and still don't know where to start. Others have high ambitions and clear ideas but are slowed down by increasing complexities and the lack of highly skilled data scientists and developers."
The analyst concludes European organisations cannot ignore big data-- marking an opportunity in selling the right infrastructure, with features such as in-memory computing, large storage pools attached to servers, linkages to cloud resources and denser architectures.
