Asset managers are making significant investments in data, cloud computing, and emerging technologies to drive greater insights and growth, according to new research published by Sapient Consulting.

The research, conducted in conjunction with WBR Research, revealed where firms are currently investing their IT budgets, as well as how and where they anticipate IT spend will evolve over the next five years. Based on a survey of 99 senior decision makers, a number of trends emerged, including:

Developing technologies: big data technology including Hadoop and NoSQL are winning the largest share of IT budgets, followed closely by cloud. The move toward streaming databases is one of the transformational trends currently in play within the industry.

Cloud adoption continues to accelerate as 29% of respondents stated their firms will have adopted the public cloud in two years, 42% within three years and 67% within five years. Interest is relatively spread across four diverse uses of the cloud – Platform as a Service (PaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) – suggesting the industry is open minded to all its potential uses.

Visualization is also coming to the fore among tech investments. It is critical to gain value from big data investments and holds applications for meeting regulatory challenges, gaining a single model of client behavior. With such broad applications, it’s not surprising that data visualization is the most invested technology type.

Firms are moving past compliance as pressure to meet regulatory standards focuses on data, the promise of transitioning into a fully business-driven unit is acting as a catalyst for the integration of emerging technologies. However, this process is only just starting, with 42% of respondents beginning to scale data management and elevate the data practice in the eyes of key stakeholders.

“We conducted the survey to examine the trajectory of the data management function as it is transformed by cloud and other developing technologies and found organizations are investing heavily in emerging technologies to create better scalability, insights, and opportunities,” said Chirag Shah, vice president at Sapient Consulting. “It is also apparent that there is still a way to go in this evolution. Over the next five years we will see a broader and deeper use of public cloud, as well as machine learning and AI, delivering greater insight at scale through stronger analytical tools.”