Tech billionaire Michael Dell says 'big data' is the next trillion-dollar tech industry

Michael Dell is trying to orchestrate the biggest tech acquisition in history, and to pull it off, he'll likely have to go up to his eyeballs in debt to pay $67 billion for EMC.

Why would he be willing to do that?

Because he's convinced that EMC holds the keys to the IT industry's monstrous market: data.

He told The Irish Examiner's Sophie Curtis:

"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.

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."

EMC is key to Dell's vision because it is the biggest player in the enterprise computer storage industry, the products companies use to store all that data.

EMC has come under attack in recent years as this big data market phenom has heated up. Companies now have lower-cost alternatives to store data using new technologies from startups or using cloud computing like Amazon's S3.

If Dell can bring its low-cost, affordable tech mindset to EMC's high-end tech and EMC's huge roster of Fortune 1000 businesses, Dell will have its fingers in that treasure trove of data.

From there, it can sell these businesses software, consulting services and other stuff they need to use their data to make instant decisions.

Dell isn't wrong that this is a tremendously valuable market, although the size of it in the near term remains to be seen.

IDC predicts the big data technology and services market will grow at a 26.4% compound annual rate to $41.5 billion through 2018, or about six times the growth rate of the overall information technology market.