Big Data to drive next IT job wave

Big Data. It’s going to be a phrase you’ll hear all through the near future.

It is used to explain the massive flow of data – such as SMSes, emails, videos, social networking messages, image and graphics uploads, and cloud computing (think Google)  — that are inundating the Web every single moment.

The rapid uptake of mobile and smartphones and Internet have led to an exponential increase in the data being spitted out, making it next to impossible to store all of it at a central location.

So managing this veritable binary tsunami presents not only a massive challenge, but also a huge opportunity, especially for a country like India, which is nearing 1 billion mobile subscribers.

The global wireline and mobile broadband traffic volumes are set to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 63% between 2011 and 2015, posing an immense business opportunity for players along the data value chain, says Goldman Sachs.

And the opportunities are multiple. From the emergence of companies set up to just to provide data analysing services – called analytics -- to major software firms acquiring these firms to cater to the growing data storage demands of their customers, and others setting up specialised in-house teams to ‘manage big data’, the list is endless.

IT firms in India even expect a majority of their revenues to come from analytics in the next 5 years, and the analytics industry here has doubled in the last two years.

At the bottom level, while Big Data is increasingly being stored in virtual data centres on the cloud, due to an inability for physical data centres to manage the spoutage, at the top level, there is a growing need for ‘data scientists’ and ‘data managers’ to develop the apps, platform and basically the technology to process this data.

Crisil Research in a report suggests that while globally, the Big Data market will grow at 45% annually to reach $25 billion by 2015, from $8 billion in 2012, in India it is expected to grow from a paltry $200 million in 2012 to $1 billion in 2015 at a CAGR of over 83%.

This explosion, Crisil said, will lead to a shortfall of 15 lakh data managers and 1.5 lakh data scientists in the US alone by 2018.

That’s a huge number considering that North America alone makes up 55% of Big Data generation.

In India, this requirement is set to grow from 1,000 in 2011 to 15,000-20,000 by 2015, while other geographies too will have their massive requirements, taking the total job opportunities north of 2 million.

Sanjeev Sinha, president – Crisil Global Research & Analytics, said since the number of campus recruits from engineering colleges are insufficient to meet the growing Big Data needs, companies will need to employ people from diverse backgrounds and provide strong in-house training of 3-6 months to mould data scientists. “The government should provide incentives for the same,” he said.

Crisil estimates there will be a total of 28 lakh IT professionals by 2015 in the country. However, it estimates that only 3-5% of the total would be employed to manage Big Data.