In 2016, the Internation Data Corporation (IDC) found out that Brazil was one of the fastest growing big data markets in Latin America, the other one being Mexico. It further predicted that the Brazilian big data market will grow to $965 million by 2018. While Brazil’s big data market is a nascent one, it offers lots of opportunities to investors and new entrants with companies aggressively pursuing new solutions capable of integrating data and running processes faster. Here are some interesting trends.
Specialisation
Big Data companies are specializing in various niches to serve the local and international markets. Below are five leading big data companies and their areas of specialization.
- Precifica -real time monitoring of products and pricing
- Big Data Corp –supports the decision making process of companies seeking to boost their online investments.
- Navegg –online targeting based on audience analysis
- Aentropico –a predictive analytics platform combining applied statistics with improved user experience to bring useful algorithms to non-tech users.
- Webradar –analysis data and pinpoints issues that telecom companies need to address to improve customer satisfaction.
Non-techies helping fix the skills gap
To realise the full potential of big data projects, it is not enough to be skilled in the technical tools. Professionals should also have a good understanding of statistics, mathematics and business-characteristics of data scientists whose demand is at an all-time high. Indeed, big data companies in Brazil have been facing a shortage of qualified professionals to work for them. There have been notable efforts by top universities to meet this demand by launching courses on the basics of data analysis. Companies have also been conducting in-house training of their employees to equip them with the requisite big data expertise. It is interesting to note that much of the training focuses on professionals with a background in mathematics or statistics as opposed to IT.
Big data washers to proliferate
The rise of cloud computing saw the proliferation of “cloud washers,” a term used to refer to companies that labelled their products and solutions as cloud even when they did not offer cloud solutions. This trend has been witnessed in big data as companies are labelling their solutions as “big data” even when they do not deliver on that promise. These are the “big data washers” that we are referring to. The trend is common to new technologies hitting the mainstream market due to absence of clear definitions and consensus on what constitutes big data. Large corporations in the telecom sector have claimed that big data is simply a new name for what they have always worked with.
Focused vendors to succeed
Big data is a huge market that accounts for hundreds of millions of IT spending in Brazil. Local companies that identified a specific problem and focused on solving it entirely have experienced tremendous success. These companies handle data collection and processing and deliver the final result to the client.
Key drivers of growth of big data market in Brazil
- Rapid expansion of social networking and mobile device penetration
- Increasingly huge volumes of data that companies have to process
