If you reckon ‘big data’ is some distant marketer spying on your Facebook posts and your credit card details then you need to think again as the data industry gears up to be tech’s next trillion-dollar battleground.

To prove data’s worth, American tech billionaire and owner of Dell Inc, Michael Dell, is reportedly set to splash out $US67 billion for data storage and cloud computing firm EMC. And why? Because Dell reckons ECM’s the only player equipped to handle the shear volume of data that’s about to be collected on us all.

“It used to be PCs and smartphones; now you have tablets and sensors and cars spinning out all kinds of telemetry data, and all kinds of machines and products and services becoming digital products,” Dell recently told The Irish Examiner.

“Within all of those devices, you have a thousand times more applications, and the data is very rich.

“If you look at companies today, most of them are not very good at using the data they have to make better decisions in real time. I think this is where the next trillion dollars comes from for our customers and for our industry,” he said.

Sure, they are other players in the data storage market, but analysts believe if Dell can harness ECM’s existing clout and make it more attainable and affordable he’ll knock the other players out of the market and he’ll basically command the data of most people on the planet. And once Dell has his hands on that he can repackage it into other software packages, cloud devices and consulting services.

In a recent report US digital analytics firm IDC said of big data sector: “The Big Data technology and services market represents a fast-growing multibillion-dollar worldwide opportunity. In fact, a recent IDC forecast shows that the Big Data technology and services market will grow at a 26.4 per cent compound annual growth rate to $41.5 billion through 2018, or about six times the growth rate of the overall information technology market. Additionally, by 2020 IDC believes that line of business buyers will help drive analytics beyond its historical sweet spot of relational (performance management) to the double-digit growth rates of real-time intelligence and exploration/discovery of the unstructured worlds.”