2014 Big Data 100: Business Analytics
Big Data Business Analytics
Businesses continue to struggle with exploding volumes of data, not just manage it to keep IT systems from being overwhelmed, but to find ways of deriving value from all that data and somehow use it for competitive advantage.
With that in mind the CRN editorial team has created the second annual Big Data 100 list, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help business work with big data. Here are 50 business analytics companies offering everything from simple-to-use reporting tools to highly sophisticated software for tackling the most complex data analysis problems.
1010data
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Sandy Steier
Founded in 2000, 1010data has been around for a while with its cloud-based software for complex business analytics and data sharing based on very large datasets. The company's software and services have particularly caught on among retailers, financial services companies and within the gaming industry.
In March the New York-based company debuted Version 7 of its 1010data platform offering new data visualization capabilities integrated directly into the system's "trillion-row spreadsheet." Also new are the QuickApps framework for in-database development and the TenUp client-side data loading tool for moving data directly into 1010data from any ODBC-compliant database.
Alpine Data Labs
Top Executive: President, CEO Joe Otto
Alpine Data Labs offers an advanced, Hadoop-based data analytics platform. The company's forte is making it possible for people without coding skills or deep analytical expertise to reap insights from large data sets using a drag-and-drop approach to creating analytical queries.
Founded in 2010, San Francisco-based Alpine Data Labs raised $16 million in Series B venture funding in November, bringing its total financing to $23.5 million.
Alteryx
Top Executive: CEO Dean Stoecker
Alteryx's software is used to blend structured and unstructured data from a range of sources into one database, conduct predictive, spatial and statistical analysis tasks, and then share the results. The Irvine, Calif.-based company was founded in 2010.
Alteryx 9.0, released in April, can tap into social media data feeds from DataSift, sales and marketing data from Google Analytics and Marketo, and customer data-centric data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift, Pivotal, Greenplum and HP Vertica. Alteryx also has a strategic alliance with business intelligence software vendor QlikTech.
Attivio
Top Executive: Co-Founder, President, CEO Ali Riaz
Attivio is a major player in the area of "unified information access," integrating structured and unstructured information from such sources as ERP and CRM systems, emails, content management systems and social media networks, making that information "accessible, meaningful and actionable."
Attivio's core platform is the Active Intelligence Engine. In February the Newton, Mass.-based company, founded in 2007, debuted a predictive analysis module that brings more analytical capabilities to nontechnical business users.
Ayasdi
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Gurjeet Singh
Ayasdi's Insight Discovery Platform, which utilizes "topological data analysis" technology combined with machine learning techniques, provides insights derived from data that help organizations solve complex problems without writing code or queries.
Ayasdi, based in Palo Alto, Calif., was founded in 2008 to leverage research from Stanford University, DARPA and the National Science Foundation. In addition to its core platform, Ayasdi offers the Ayasdi Cure system for analyzing and visualizing complex clinical and genomic data for drug development.
Birst
Top Executive: CEO Jay Larson
Birst offers a Software-as-a-Service business intelligence platform with visual analytics and an automated data warehouse system. Birst's value proposition is that its cloud system is a less complex, less expensive alternative to on-premise BI systems.
San Francisco-based Birst was founded in 2004. The company recently named former Jive Software and SuccessFactors executive Jay Larson to be the company's new CEO, taking over from co-founder Brad Peters, who's focusing on product development. The company also launched an OEM partner program for developers who embed Birst within their solutions.
Chartio
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Dave Fowler
Chartio develops cloud-based data visualization software that businesses use to combine data sets and create charts and dashboards for analysis -- all without the need to develop an on-premise data warehouse.
In January the San Francisco-based company raised $2.2 million in financing, in addition to the $4.4 million it raised in 2011. The company, founded in 2010, also enhanced its software with the ability to execute custom formulas for analysis and the capability to combine data from multiple sources without the need for data ETL tools.
Cirro
Top Executive: CEO Mark Theissen
Cirro develops a next-generation data federation platform that makes it possible for nontechnical users to query and explore structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and perform complex analytical tasks. The Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2010.
The company's products include the Cirro Data Hub, which determines and orchestrates where a query will be processed and issues appropriate data requests to relevant sources; Cirro Analyst for Excel, which allows Excel to be used as a front-end analysis tool; and Cirro Multi Store for data staging or creating workspaces and datamarts.
ClearStory Data
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Sharmila Mulligan
ClearStory launched its big data analysis and exploration platform and applications late last year. The company's Data Intelligence software is designed to make it easier to access internal and external data sources, including corporate databases, Hadoop and the Internet, and use that data to uncover trends and patterns.
ClearStory Data, Palo Alto, Calif., was founded in 2011. It raised $21 million in Series B financing in March, bringing its total funding to $31.5 million.
Continuum Analytics
Top Executive: Co-founder, CEO Travis Oliphant
Continuum Analytics, founded in 2011, develops data analytics software based on the Python programming language. In February the Austin, Texas-based company released Anaconda 1.9, the latest version of its collection of libraries for big data management analysis and cross-platform visualization for business intelligence, scientific, engineering and machine learning tasks.
DataGravity
Top Executive: Co-founder, CEO Paula Long
This intriguing startup remains in stealth mode, but it's attracting lots of attention. The company was co-founded by Paula Long and John Joseph, key executives behind storage technology developer EqualLogic, which Dell acquired in 2008 for $1.4 billion. The company just hired Steve Noyes, former Oracle engineering vice president, for the same post at DataGravity.
DataGravity's website says the Nashua, N.H.-based company's mission is "turning data into information" and "make storage an active asset for SMBs." We also know DataGravity will be 100 percent channel-driven and is recruiting early access channel partners. Look for a product launch later this year.
DataHero
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Chris Neumann
Under the motto of "Analytics Simplified," this San Francisco-based company develops software that analyzes data and automatically creates visualizations -- charts and graphs -- from the information without the need for the user to tackle complex coding.
The company, founded in 2011, launched its service one year ago. In December it snagged $3.15 million in extended seed funding, money the company is using to expand its sales and engineering staffs and take the company to the next level.
Datameer
Top Executive: CEO Stefan Groschupf
Founded in 2009 by some of the original contributors to Apache Hadoop, Datameer develops software that helps business users of Hadoop integrate, analyze and visualize large volumes of data.
Datameer secured $19 million in Series D financing in December. Last month the San Mateo, Calif.-based company launched Datameer 4.0 with a "flip side" feature to its spreadsheet interface that helps users understand information about the data such as a column's distribution, maximum, minimum, mean and record count.
DataSift
Top Executive: CEO Rob Bailey
DataSift develops a social data platform that businesses use to monitor social media such as Twitter, aggregate and filter data from public social conversations, and extract insights from that data. A company might use DataSift to gain insights about consumer opinion of its brand, for example, or glean competitive intelligence.
In December San Francisco-based DataSift (founded in 2010) raised $42 million in Series C financing, money the company is using to expand its sales and marketing efforts and develop its platform to include the ability to work with additional data types such as internal company data.
Datawatch
Top Executive: President, CEO Michael Morrison
Datawatch develops visual data discovery applications for creating data visualizations in real time from structured, semi-structured and Hadoop-based data. In April the company delivered Datawatch 12.3 with improvements to the software's ability to work with streaming, real-time data and develop visualizations using unstructured data.
Datawatch, based in Chelmsford, Mass., acquired Panopticon, a developer of real-time data discovery software, in August 2013. Datawatch reported sales of $8 million for the company's second fiscal quarter ended March 31, up 17 percent from one year earlier, and a loss of $6.7 million.
Digital Reasoning
Top Executive: CEO Tim Estes
Digital Reasoning's Synthesys machine learning platform collects structured and unstructured data and analyzes it, using entity extraction and semantic relationship analysis techniques, to identify risks, threats and opportunities.
In January Franklin, Tenn.-based Digital Reasoning (founded in 2000) debuted Synthesys 3.8 with the ability to leverage Cloudera for real-time queries on Hadoop. The release also includes the Synthesys Glance Web application for mobile and tablet devices.
Domo
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Josh James
Domo offers a cloud-based executive management platform the company said gives users access to information scattered across myriad sources through a single dashboard. The American Fork, Utah-based company was founded in 2011 by James, previously the co-founder and longtime CEO of Omniture.
In February the company raised $125 million in Series C financing, doubling its total venture funding. At the time the company said its annual growth was "far exceeding" 100 percent and that it had signed roughly 500 customers.
Gainsight
Top Executive: CEO Nick Mehta
Gainsight develops predictive analytics software that's integrated with Salesforce.com's CRM applications and helps users scrutinize customer data for customer retention and identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
In March the Mountain View, Calif. company, founded in 2009, launched the spring release of its platform, offering "success snapshots" to drive customer retention and subscription renewals, and a Salesforce1 mobile application.
Glassbeam
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Puneet Pandit
Glassbeam develops Software-as-a-Service applications for product analytics based on machine log data, putting it in a key position in business intelligence in the nascent-but-growing Internet of Things market.
In February Glassbeam, founded in 2009 and based in Sunnyvale, Calif., struck an OEM deal with Hitachi Data Systems under which Hitachi will build Glassbeam's log analysis technology into its Managed Private Cloud service.
GoodData
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Roman Stanek
In March GoodData launched the cloud-based GoodData Open Analytics Platform, the company's next-generation data governance and discovery Platform-as-a-Service for storing, combining, analyzing and visualizing information.
In February the privately held company said its revenue and customer base both grew in 2013, adding 116 new customers during the year and signing 30 six-figure deals. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2007, raised $22 million in Series D financing in June 2013.
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Larry Page
Google, of course, has built a $60 billion business largely around its search engine. But in 2012 it jumped into the business intelligence arena with its BigQuery online analytics service that lets businesses analyze huge datasets.
In March the Mountain View, Calif.-based company launched BigQuery Streaming, a service that's capable of analyzing up to 100,000 rows of data per second in real time.
Guavus
Top Executive: CEO Manish Goel
Guavus develops the Guavus Reflex Platform data analytics system and a suite of operational intelligence applications for making business process decisions. In March, for example, the company debuted its CareReflex application for identifying the root causes of complex customer issues. In February the company said its applications could be deployed in virtualized environments.
Guavus, founded in 2006 and based in San Mateo, Calif., named former NetApp executive Manish Goel as its new CEO last October, replacing founder Anukool Lakhina, who is now focused on corporate strategy.
Information Builders
Top Executive: President, CEO Gerald Cohen
Information Builders is a longtime player in the business intelligence arena with its business analytics products, including its flagship WebFocus software, and its integration and data integrity software. In January New York-based Information Builders launched Skybox, a cloud hosting service for developing and testing applications for business intelligence applications.
The privately held company signed more than 100 new accounts in 2013, up 20 percent from 2012.
JasperSoft
Top Executive: CEO Brian Gentile
Jaspersoft develops simple-to-use business intelligence applications, including business analytics and reporting, production reporting, cloud analytics, big data analytics and mobile BI. The tools are available for use by businesses and by application developers who embed Jaspersoft's technology within their own software. The company operates on a commercial open-source business model.
Tibco Software acquired privately held Jaspersoft on April 28 for approximately $185 million. Tibco said Jaspersoft's applications complement Tibco's Spotfire data discovery and interactive analytics software.
Jut
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Steve McCanne
Jut is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2013 that remains in stealth mode as it develops software for capturing and analyzing big data.
The company raised $20 million in Series B financing in November from investors Wing VC, Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Kognitio
Top Executive: President, CEO Steve Millard
Kognitio, New York, develops an in-memory analytical software platform that supports OLAP and analytical applications on large volumes of complex data. The Kognitio Analytical Platform runs on industry-standard servers as an appliance or as a Platform-as-a-Service in a private or public cloud.
LucidWorks
Top Executive: President, CEO Paul Doscher
LucidWorks Search, the company's flagship product, is an enterprise-grade search development platform based on Apache Lucene/Solr technology. LucidWorks Big Data is an application development platform that provides comprehensive search, discovery and analysis of an organization's content and user interaction data.
LucidWorks, founded in 2007 and based in Redwood City, Calif., struck an alliance with Hadoop vendor Hortonworks in April to allow Hortonworks customers to access and analyze data through Apache Solr. Also in April LucidWorks launched SiLK, a search-driven application based on Solr for analyzing massive amounts of log and time-series data.
Metric Insights
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Marius Moscovici
Metric Insights pitches its "push intelligence" technology as an antidote to business intelligence reports and dashboards that the company said makes users hunt for information. The Metrics Insight software delivers personalized business intelligence, key performance indicators and alerts.
San Francisco-based Metric Insights, founded in 2010, won first place at last October's O'Reilly + Hadoop World Startup Showcase 2013 for the investors' vote.
MicroStrategy
Top Executive: CEO Michael Saylor
MicroStrategy, founded in 1989, is one of the industry's largest business intelligence software companies with 2013 revenue of $575 million. The MicroStrategy Analytics Platform analyzes huge volumes of data and delivers reports and dashboards to users throughout an organization. In recent years the company has aggressively expanded into mobile business intelligence software.
In January Tysons Corner, Va.-based MicroStrategy launched its cloud-based Parallel Relational In-Memory Engine (PRIME) analytics service designed to handle the largest data sets and highest number of concurrent users.
Numerify
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Gaurav Rewari
Startup Numerify just emerged from stealth mode in April to debut its cloud-based IT Enterprise Analytics Platform. The analytics application is built on ServiceNow's IT management software and collects and analyzes operational and financial data about an organization's IT systems that managers use to monitor system performance and make decisions about IT assets and capacity.
Cupertino, Calif.-based Numerify, founded in 2012, raised $8 million in Series A financing in October 2013.
Palantir Technologies
Top Executive: CEO Alex Karp
Founded in 2004 by a number of former PayPal managers and Stanford University data scientists, Palantir develops bleeding-edge software that organizations use to analyze massive volumes of disparate data. The company likes to boast that its technology is used to tackle the most complex problems, ranging from fraud detection and anti-terrorism applications to tracking disease outbreaks and spotting trends in financial trading data.
Palantir, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is known to have ties with U.S, intelligence and law enforcement agencies: One of its investors is In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture company.
Panorama Software
Top Executive: CEO Eynav Azarya
Panorama calls itself "a leader in business intelligence 3.0" with its Panorama Necto software that lets users visually analyze information in a self-service environment.
In April Toronto-based Panorama debuted Necto 14 with new infographics capabilities that present complex information in an easy-to-understand format. This month the company said Necto 14 is integrated with Microsoft's SQL Server 2014 database.
Paradigm4
Top Executive: CEO Marilyn Matz
Paradigm4 is another of the current crop of startups that's finding ways to apply leading-edge technology to the problem of analyzing massive volumes of data for complex problems in financial services, life sciences and other data-intensive industries.
Paradigm4, founded in 2010 and based in Waltham, Mass., develops the SciDB scalable array database with native complex analytics capabilities. Database luminary Michael Stonebraker is the company's CTO.
ParStream
Top Executive: CEO Michael Hummel
ParStream develops a distributed, massively parallel processing columnar database that's designed to analyze and filter billions of records in sub-second time. The company, based in Cologne, Germany, has its U.S. headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
ParStream, founded in 2008, recently struck an alliance with MicroStrategy under which that vendor's business analytics software could tap into the processing capabilities of the ParStream database, allowing users to interactively analyze extremely large data sets in real time.
Pentaho
Top Executive: CEO Quentin Gallivan
Pentaho offers a business analytics platform that includes reporting, ad hoc discovery and predictive analytics capabilities coupled with data integration technology.
Pentaho, founded in 2004 and based in Orlando, Fla., recorded 83 percent bookings growth in 2013 for its big data and embedded analytics products. Last month the company hired Christopher Dziekan, previously head of analytics product strategy at IBM, as the company's new chief product officer.
Platfora
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Ben Werther
Platfora offers a big data analytics toolset that's native to the Hadoop platform, allowing users to directly analyze data in Hadoop without the need to build a separate data warehouse system. The software is offered for on-premise deployments or as a cloud service.
This month the San Mateo, Calif.-based company, founded in 2011, debuted a release of its software with a new programmatic query access for data scientists, and enhanced data visualization and discovery capabilities for line-of-business users.
QlikTech
Top Executive: CEO Lars Bjork
QlikTech targets a broad range of business users for its popular QlikView business intelligence platform that combines analytics, visualization and search capabilities. The vendor is also a channel favorite with some 1,100 channel and OEM partners worldwide.
QlikTech, founded in 1993 and based in Radnor, Pa., reported sales of $470.5 million in 2013, up 21 percent from 2012. The company will begin offering a free desktop version of QlikView.Next Personal Edition early in the third quarter.
Revolution Analytics
Top Executive: CEO Dave Rich
Revolution Analytics markets a big data analytics platform that's based on the open-source "R" statistical programming language and software development environment. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company's Revolution R Enterprise supports a range of big data statistics, predictive modeling and machine learning analytical applications.
In February Revolution Analytics, founded in 2007, began offering its Revolution R Enterprise 7 software through the Amazon Web Services marketplace, allowing users to run computations on data sets as big as 1 TB in the cloud.
Rubikloud Technologies
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Kerry Liu
This year-old startup has developed a cloud-based, real-time data analytics platform for processing, analyzing and searching continuous streams of data. The company's stated mission is "to turn data into revenue."
Last month Toronto-based Rubikloud was voted "the most disruptive cloud startup" at The Cloud Factory conference in Banff. Working with $1 million in financing, the company is now working with early adopter customers with its product.
SAP
Top Executive: CEO Bill McDermott
SAP entered the business intelligence space in a big way in 2007 when it acquired Business Objects, then one of the leading business intelligence software developers. Today the company's big data software portfolio includes that core business intelligence platform (although the Business Objects name seems to be on the way out), the Lumira visualization tool, and predictive analytics software from last year's acquisition of KXEN.
Most recently the emphasis has been on making all those products available on SAP's HANA Enterprise Cloud system.
SAS Institute
Top Executive: CEO Jim Goodnight
Founded in 1976, SAS coud be considered the original business intelligence software company. Today it develops a broad range of business intelligence, analytics and data management software, performance and risk management applications. It also supplies analytical software for specific tasks such as supply chain management and fraud detection, and for specific industries such as life sciences and retail.
The privately held company, based in Cary, N.C., reported that annual sales in 2013 exceeded $3 billion.
Seeq
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Steve Sliwa
Seeq is developing software and services that help businesses derive insights from industrial process data, such as information collected from sensors and instrument systems, to aid with operational continuous improvement.
Founded in May 2013, the Seattle-based company raised $6 million in Series A funding in November.
SiSense
Top Executive: CEO Amit Bendov
SiSense offers business intelligence and dashboard applications for analyzing and visualizing data collected from multiple sources. The company boasts that everyday business workers can use its products without the need for coding or help from the IT department.
Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, SiSense was founded in 2010 and has raised $14 million in financing.
Splunk
Top Executive: President, CEO Godfrey Sullivan
Splunk develops operational intelligence software for monitoring, reporting and analyzing real-time machine data as well as historical data stored on-premise or in the cloud. Earlier this month the company launched Splunk Enterprise 6.1 with enhanced interactive analytics, embedded reports and multisite clustering capabilities. The company also offers Hunk, a version of its analytical software for Hadoop and NoSQL data stores.
For its fiscal 2014 ended Jan. 31 Splunk, based in San Francisco and founded in 2003, reported revenue of $302.6 million.
Sqrrl
Top Executive: CEO Mark Terenzoni
Sqrrl was quietly started in 2012, but the Cambridge, Mass.-based company got a lot of attention in the past year given that its founders came from the National Security Agency and helped develop that organization's massive database.
The Sqrrl Enterprise database offers column, graph and document store capabilities to power big data applications. The product's real forte is its ability to scale up and provide data security at the cell level. The 1.3 release in February offered security enhancements, performance improvements and new data storage and storage capabilities.
Sumo Logic
Top Executive: President, CEO Vance Loiselle
Sumo Logic brings big data analytics to IT management, calling itself "the next-generation machine data analytics company." Sumo Logic's software analyzes IT performance data in real time, providing actionable insights for IT operations, application management, and security and compliance managers.
Sumo Logic was founded in 2010 and is based in Mountain View, Calif. In April the company integrated its software with ServiceNow's IT service management cloud services, providing users with the ability to detect and remedy anomalous events in real time.
Tableau Software
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Christian Chabot
Tableau has become one of the most visible of the new generation of business intelligence software thanks to its successful initial public offering last year. The company offers server, desktop and cloud business analytics applications that are easy to use and provide sophisticated visualization capabilities.
Seattle-based Tableau was founded in 2003. A Gartner report released earlier this month ranked Tableau among the top 10 business intelligence and analytics software vendors by revenue and market share.
Tibco Software
Top Executive: CEO Vivek Ranadive
Tibco is a broad-based software vendor with products for event processing, application integration and cloud management. Tibco became a player in the business analytics space in 2007 when it acquired Spotfire, a sophisticated data discovery and interactive analytics tool.
Tibco greatly expanded its presence in the BI market just last month when it acquired Jaspersoft, a developer of open-source business analytics and reporting, production reporting, cloud analytics and mobile BI tools. Tibco, based in Palo Alto, Calif., paid approximately $185 million for Jaspersoft.
Via Science
Top Executive: CEO Colin Gounden
Via Science "applies big math" to solve complex analytics problems, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based company. The vendor's core technology is its Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation (REFS) software that automates big data and predictive analytics and runs on supercomputers such as IBM's Blue Gene/Q and cloud infrastructure such as Amazon's EC2.
Zoomdata
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Justin Langseth
Zoomdata develops software that allows users to connect, visualize and interact with data through browsers and mobile devices. Companies use Zoomdata's software to create dashboards and connect them to disparate data sources.
Zoomdata was founded 2012 and is based in Reston, Va.