In the age of the customer, insights-driven businesses use big data solutions to gain business insights, create differentiated customer experiences, and drive competitive advantage. In our recently published Big Data Management Solutions Forecast, 2016 To 2021 (Global ), we take a more in-depth look at the software solutions to manage big data.

Big data management solutions address data sets that are so large and complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Nonrelational databases are one of the key tools to manage and search the increasingly large and diverse types of data. Scaling is built into nonrelational databases, allowing them to support millions of users and hundreds of terabytes of data. The cost of a nonrelational database is typically only 10% of the cost of a comparable traditional relational database.

The complexity and richness of data is changing, along with exploding data volume and velocity. Unstructured data, such as text, tweets, graphs, and video, is an increasingly important source of information. Not surprisingly, we expect nonrelational databases to be the fastest-growing sector within big data management solutions. We forecast that NoSQL will grow 25.0% and Hadoop will grow 32.9% annually over the forecast period.

On September 21, 2016, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time, the Forrester Data team presents the Big Data, Big Promises, Big Growth webinar. Tyler McDaniel and I will share highlights from our proprietary surveys and forecasts, and we’ll share why and where we see big data market growth and opportunity. The webinar is open to all Forrester clients.

If you have interest in the topic, be sure to check out the reports by my colleagues Noel Yuhanna and Brian Hopkins : Tech Radar™: Big Data, Q1 2016 and The Insights-Driven Business

To learn how our forecasts can help you with your investment decision, read our ForecastView overview.