Gartner Sees 4.4M Big Data Jobs by 2015

Gartner Inc. says worldwide IT spending will increase 3.8 percent in 2013 to reach $3.7 trillion, and that excitement for big data is leading the way. By 2015, the analyst and market research firm says, 4.4 million jobs will be created to support big data.

The news came from Gartner’s IT Expo being held this week in Orlando in a release and a recorded keynote from Peter Sondergard, Gartner SVP and global head of research. Of the 4.4 million jobs, 1.9 will be in the U.S. and Sondergard added that every big-data related role in the U.S. will create employment for three people outside of IT for a total of 6 million jobs in the U.S.

Sondergard did not specify roles or how the new positions are big data “related,” for instance, whether a mobile app developer or business analyst hire would constitute a new big data job. But he did identify four domains: cloud, mobile, social computing and big data itself as the drivers of the job economy in IT. Other vendors and analyst firms have similarly targeted the same four areas, which Gartner is calling “The Nexus of Forces” that work in combination to create business and productivity synergies.

Sondergard said mobile is “the point of entry for all applications, delivering personalized, contextual experiences.” For the enterprise, he added that by 2014, more than 50 percent of applications in enterprises will be running on iOS, Android or Windows 8, rendering today’s infrastructure “obsolete.” Therefore, enterprises need to “think about what you would do in terms of redeveloping those architectures.” 

Likewise, he said cloud computing is “the carrier” for the other three forces and the foundation for mobile, social computing and big data. Organizations are not just interested in cost-cutting through services, but in gaining new approaches and capabilities they do not have today.

He added that much of today’s technology transformation is happening outside the purview of IT, requiring another look at organizational structures and consequences for IT. Sondergard repeated earlier Gartner predictions that by the end of this year, CIOs will have lost effective control of 25 percent of their organization’s IT spending. By 2017, Gartner predicts that chief marketing officers would hold greater IT spending budgets than their CIO counterparts.

This story originally appeared at Information Management.