IT solutions provider EMC on Monday in New Delhi said that the big-data analytics market in India, which it expects to more than double by 2015, presents a huge opportunity for the company. Big Data analytics is the capability to access, analyse and use large volumes of data and help companies get important insights for creating business value.

According to a recent report by McKinsey and Co, "Big Data refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software to capture, store, manage and analyse. Currently, it can range from a few dozen terabytes to multiple petabytes." Industry experts believe analytics is receiving a major boost as there is an exponential growth in big data. "India presents a huge market opportunity for EMC. In fact the largest Big Data customer for EMC globally is from India," EMC India & SAARC President Rajesh Janey told PTI.

As per a report by EMC and IDC, India alone generated nearly 40,000 petabytes of data in 2010. "It is estimated that India's share of digital information will grow 60 times by 2020, driven by the roll-out of 3G/BWA networks, digitisation of television networks, government services like the Unique ID project, Census, among others," the report said. "With such huge amount of data generated, the Big Data analytics market in India is estimated to reach approximately USD 680 million by 2015 from about USD 320 million in 2011," Janey said.

According to McKinsey Global Institute report, five key areas with maximum Big Data potential are healthcare, public sector, retail, manufacturing and personal location data. Recent example of usage of Big Data analytics is the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle or the 'God particle'. "Scientists had to analyse more than 800 trillion proton-proton collisions to look for the 'God particle', which would not have been possible without the advances in Big Data research and capabilities," EMC said. Citing another example, EMC stated that T-Mobile USA used big data to study customer defections based on the analysis of its 33 million customer records, web logs, billing data and social media information. The insights helped it reduced churn by half in a single quarter.