IDC loves tracking stuff. When it's not too busy counting the PCs, laptops and tablets that are flying through the world's retail channels, it has smaller divisions that apply the same kind of ‘must know it all' mentality to other markets. Dan Vesset runs the Business Analytics effort and, right now, he claims to be tracking more than $50 billion in technology spending. KitGuru attempts to relate that figure to the rapidly falling price of SSD drives on the high street.

This Dan Vesset chap is a realist. He knows that the entire analytics market suffered alongside the regular technology markets from 2007 to 2009. However, it does seem that companies' desire to know what will happen – by analysing what has already been – was a significant driving force. His market came out of recession early and it seems to be on a serious growth path.

So what does a ‘serious growth path' look like?    Well, we live in a world where the desktop PC market may never grow significantly again – but in contrast, the analytics sector has been purchasing by more than 14% a year. Even after 3 years of growth at that rate, Dan still believes that it will carry on at close to 10% a year through to 2016.

We're no experts on this market, but even a little research onto sites like http://acquisitions.ulitzer.com show that there are 3 distinct sub-divisions present:-

1. Big Data Warehousing – which has increased more than 15% a year
2. Analytics – which trails at around 13%
3. Intelligence and tools – which is just about level with Analytics

The world's larger companies came under pressure around 2007 from legislation that said that they needed to improve their back end storage systems – to move from a reliance on ‘only available when it's actually loaded on a reader' tap-based technology – and move toward faster hard drives.

Knowing that the more data you can ‘access and analyse quicker', the better chance that you will gain competitive advantage – the more pressure there will be to move at least part of the data centre to Solid State Drives. Especially with increasing storage densities and fast falling prices.

KitGuru says: In our experience, the trouble with IDC's Trackers is that they tend to be very good at including/analysing the big numbers from the big companies, but it can struggle to follow the armies of enthusiasts around the world who are building and upgrading rigs themselves. The upshot being that the actual potential for SSD companies might be even bigger than IDC/Gartner suspect.

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