One of the UK’s fastest growing “data tech” companies forecasts big market changes next year

1. London becomes the preeminent data capital in the world: Next year, London be recognized by venture capitalists and other experts as the world’s capital for data-focused technology start-ups as organizations struggle to control and manage the explosion in data sources. Silicon Valley will remain the capital for consumer-oriented software companies, Boston for bio-technology companies and Israel for internet-based innovations.

2. Small, big and small again: Over the past five years, organizations have been lured away from focusing on how to exploit the value of internal data by the hype with big data and its promises promoted by vendors. However, with organizations realising the difficulty of turning complex data into meaningful information, business leaders will return to making the most of the large volumes of data already sitting within their four walls.

3. Bye, bye vizzy: The ‘data discovery’ market will undergo a major upheaval in 2015 with the acquisition of visualization vendors. The driving forces behind market consolidation include companies’ desire to acquire new customers and product portfolios, coupled with revenue targets. However, with the freemium model now so popular, data discovery vendors must offer more value than just visualization.
Business users will also increasingly question the value of visualization tools that don’t have data quality capabilities embedded. An overload of unintelligible data will see more demand for better quality data and data preparation technologies leading to a surge of start-ups offering these services.
“The data analytics space will continue to mature in 2015 and companies will begin to look beyond the ‘big data’ trend and realise the importance of utilising the sets of ‘smaller data’ that they already have,” said Charles Clark, CEO of Rosslyn Analytics.

4. Data re-organization and the growth of self-service: A new role will emerge on the organograms of organizations and it’s the “Data Officer.” This person will be responsible for ensuring business objectives are met by aligning people with relevant information. They will work closely with IT and other stakeholders to assess strengths and weaknesses in data.
The “Data Officer” will empower different sections of the business to utilise the benefits of data by provisioning self-service analytics. By using self-service tools, non-technical users will directly interact with the data and increasingly be embedded into technologies across and down into the stack, closer to the source than ever before – including Hadoop.

5. Data will be weighed: Finally, after years of debate, industries will move closer to defining a value for data as a strategic asset similar to how accountants and finance professionals currently value physical assets such as property and information management systems. Data will be a measurable currency and organizations will focus much more on improving and managing it.
“Next year, we will see a big shift in business focus away from the traditional visualisation vendors as it becomes clear they are not a one-stop-shop for data analytics. A far greater importance will be placed on business user-driven cleansing and enrichment of data, a crucial stage required in turning unusable data into meaningful and relevant information for decision-makers,” added Charles Clark.