Employment in this sector is expected to more than double over the next six years, adding an estimated 15,000 jobs, according to a report to be released today by the Mass Technology Leadership Council.
“We have an opportunity for Massachusetts to be a real center of gravity around big data,’’ said Tom Hopcroft, the council’s chief executive. “In Massachusetts, we have decades of really hardcore database expertise going back to the 1960s, and a lot of this knowledge has been retained here.’’
Bluefin Labs Inc. is one of the companies expected to grow. The Cambridge start-up is trying to make sense of a big chunk of social media-generated data by analyzing 3 billion online comments about television every month.
The idea is to measure the collective mood about everything from commercials to reality TV to political debates in a way traditional polling or television ratings cannot. For instance, Bluefin used social media comments to gauge viewer attitudes toward Republicans presidential candidates during a recent debate.
“Literally, on our screens, we can see those comments in social media in real time,’’ said Tom Thai, Bluefin’s vice president of business development. “The really cool thing about social data is that you can see more than just volume,’’ he said. “What were people saying about their shows? What were they saying about their competitors?’’
In addition to the state’s 100 big data companies, the report notes, another 20 start-ups have recently emerged for a piece of the data and analytics marketplace, which McKinsey Global Institute recently estimated was worth $64 billion. In the past several years, local tech companies have been acquired for their data analytics know-how by the likes of IBM, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard for price tags that have reached into the billions.
Michael Stonebraker, adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the area’s information-crunching pioneers, said there has long been a deep talent pool in data management in the state. But new technology has moved the field beyond traditional database systems from Oracle or IBM.
