Big Data 100: Infrastructure And Services

Big Data Infrastructure And Services Vendors

Businesses are struggling with the rapidly increasing volume, speed and variety of information being generated today -- what's come to be known as big data. Companies are seeking technologies that not only help them process and manage all that data, but tap into it to develop insights about the markets they compete in as well as their own performance within those markets.

Recognizing that need we present the inaugural Big Data 100 list, developed by the CRN editorial team, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help businesses manage big data. Here are 25 big data infrastructure and services vendors, including industry stalwarts and startups.

Amazon Web Services

Location: Seattle
Top Executive: CEO Jeff Bezos

Who would have thought a company that started out as an online bookseller would become a major force in IT? Amazon Web Services, including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service, provides online data storage, cloud infrastructure and application services that have become a go-to platform for many big data projects.

CA Technologies

Location: Islandia, N.Y.
Top Executive: CEO Michael Gregoire

CA offers the ARCserve line of data management software and ERwin data modeling tools, both of which help businesses wrestling with big data challenges. ERwin, for example, helps businesses manage increasingly complex data structures when designing database systems, data warehouses and applications.

Cloudera

Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Mike Olson

Cloudera offers a big data platform based on its distribution of Apache Hadoop (Cloudera Enterprise), along with tools for implementing (Cloudera Quickstart) and managing (Cloudera Manager) Hadoop. Cloudera Navigator helps administrators, data managers and analysts to secure, govern and explore data within Cloudera Enterprise.

Cloudwick Technologies

Location: Hayward, Calif.
Top Executive: President Maninder Chhabra

Cloudwick provides a range of services around the Hadoop platform including developing and deploying Hadoop-based systems for businesses, integrating them with other data sources within an organization, monitoring those systems, and analyzing data collected within Hadoop.

Compuverde

Location: Karlskrona, Sweden
Top Executive: CEO Stefan Bernbo

Compuverde specializes in developing "green" big data storage systems for solution providers, telecommunications companies and businesses. The company says its cloud-based Compuverde Object Store systems can manage more than 100 petabytes of unstructured data and operate with 99.999 percent uptime.

Continuuity

Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Todd Papaioannou

Continuuity sees application development as the next big challenge in big data. The core of the startup's cloud-based offerings, currently in beta, is the Continuuity App-Fabric development platform built on Hadoop and related components. App-Fabric also serves as a runtime and data platform for big data applications.

DataGuise

Location: Fremont, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Manmeet Singh

One troubling aspect of big data is that there's potentially more sensitive data that could be left unprotected. DataGuise offers its DgSecure line of tools to identify an organization's sensitive data, ensure it's being protected in compliance with such regulations as HIPAA and PCI, and apply data encryption, masking and other remedies.

Dell

Location: Round Rock, Texas
Top Executive: CEO Michael Dell

In the big data space Dell offers the Dell/Hadoop Big Data Solution that combines Cloudera's Hadoop distribution with Dell's PowerEdge C servers and Pentaho's Business Analytics software. Dell also has the Kitenga Analytics software, part of last year's Quest acquisition, for analyzing structured and unstructured data in Hadoop.

EMC

Location: Hopkinton, Mass.
Top Executive: CEO Joseph Tucci

As a data storage IT company, EMC certainly understands the challenges associated with managing huge volumes of information. Beyond its core storage systems, EMC offers the Greenplum line of business analytics software and Pivotal HD, its own Hadoop distribution coupled with MPP-based SQL database services and VMware virtualization technology.

Hewlett-Packard

Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Meg Whitman

HP has a range of hardware, software and services in the big data space. Perhaps most prominent is the Vertica big data analytics platform. HP also recently unveiled the HP Big Data Discovery Experience, an information management and analytics service to help businesses derive value from their big data assets.

Hortonworks

Location: Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Rob Bearden

Hortonworks is one of the more visible big data startups, offering the Hortonworks Data Platform built around its own Hadoop distribution and related components. The company also offers support and training services and a downloadable "sandbox" version of Hadoop for evaluation.

IBM

Location: Armonk, N.Y.
Top Executive: President and CEO Virginia Rometty

With its server and storage hardware systems, database software (DB2, Informix, InfoSphere) and business analytics applications (Cognos, SPSS and others), IBM can boast of having one of the broadest big data lineups. IBM just unveiled a Hadoop-ready version of its PureData System server and a number of big data-related enhancements to DB2.

Infochimps

Location: Austin, Texas
Top Executive: CEO Jim Kaskade

The Infochimps Enterprise Cloud is a suite of cloud services for developing and deploying big data analytics applications in public and private clouds. The Infochimps system supports data storage and access for Hadoop, HBase and NoSQL databases and custom applications, and lets businesses perform realtime, ad hoc and batch data analysis tasks.

MapR Technologies

Location: San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO John Schroeder

Competing with Cloudera, Hortonworks and other Hadoop distributors, MapR offers multiple editions of its Hadoop distribution combined with training, support and other professional services. Also offered are software and services for vertical industries such as health care, manufacturing and retail.

Microsoft

Location: Redmond, Wash.
Top Executive: CEO Steve Ballmer

While it doesn't compete with IBM and Oracle in hardware, Microsoft is all in for big data on software with its SQL Server 2012 database and business analytics software. Its HDInsight Services, built on the Hortonworks Data Platform, is a service for deploying and provisioning Hadoop clusters in the cloud. HDInsight for Windows Server and Windows Azure are in beta.

Mortar Data

Location: New York
Top Executive: CEO K Young

Mortar Data provides a cloud-based Hadoop service, essentially a Platform-as-a-Service version of Apache Hadoop, that helps developers and data scientists collaborate on building applications around giant data sets without all the headaches. At the core of the offering is the company's open-source development framework.

NetApp

Location: Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: President and CEO Tom Georgens

NetApp offers more than just hardware for managing big data. The NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop is a ready-to-deploy storage system that supports Hadoop clusters for big data analytics. It also develops enterprise content and distributed content repositories and a high-performance storage system that supports the Lustre parallel distributed file system.

Oracle

Location: Redwood Shores, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Larry Ellison

From its flagship relational database, to its business analytics software, to "engineered systems" such as its Exadata Database Machine, Oracle has a broad range of big data products. Its most specific big data offering is the Oracle Big Data Appliance, an Intel-based server bundled with Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop and Oracle's own NoSQL database.

Rackspace

Location: San Antonio
Top Executive: CEO Lanham Napier

Rackspace offers a number of Hadoop-related services, including running Hadoop for customers on dedicated servers or through Rackspace private cloud services. (A Hadoop public cloud service is in the works.) Rackspace has partnered with Hortonworks to provide application support and system architecture design services around its Hadoop distribution.

RightScale

Location: Santa Barbara, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Michael Crandell

Rightscale provides a range of cloud computing services for provisioning, monitoring, reporting and securing big data applications built on Hadoop and NoSQL ecosystems. It offers a number of what it calls Server Templates in its MultiCloud Marketplace, including Hadoop MapReduce, IBM BigInsights Hadoop Framework, MongoDB and Couchbase.

Software AG

Location: Darmstadt, Germany
Top Executive: CEO Karl-Heinz Streibich

The Terracotta line of management software is the core of Software AG's offerings. Terracotta, which Software AG acquired in 2011, includes tools that manage in-memory data, analyze in-memory data and act on the results. They also improve application performance and scalability, and schedule processing jobs across multiple computing nodes.

StackIQ

Location: La Jolla, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Joe Markee

StackIQ markets the StackIQ Enterprise Data software for deploying and managing clustered big data systems. Originally the product supported the Hortonworks distribution of Hadoop, but recently StackIQ debuted a "multidistribution" edition that supports Hadoop distributions from Cloudera, MapR Technologies, DataStax and others.

Teradata

Location: Dayton, Ohio
Top Executive: President and CEO Michael Koehler

Teradata offers a range of hardware platforms (including the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse and the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance), database software, data analysis tools and analytical applications for retail decisions, marketing, channel management, customer data analysis, and for the airline and transportation industries.

Treasure Data

Location: Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Hiro Yoshikawa

Treasure Data provides a cloud-based data analysis platform, dubbed Big Data-as-a-Service. Businesses collect data from operational applications, system log files, sensors and more, upload it to the Treasure Data data warehouse for analysis, then download the results to spreadsheets, databases and other applications via SQL, JBC or ODBC interfaces.

Zettaset

Location: Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: President and CEO Jim Vogt

Zettaset's Orchestrator software, which supports Hadoop distributions from multiple vendors, automates and simplifies Hadoop deployments. Perhaps more important, it adds a measure of "enterprise-class" security and compliance management to those deployments.