Emerging Vendors 2014: Big Data Vendors (Part 1)
Rising Big Data Stars
Technology for managing and analyzing big data is one of the fastest-growing segments of the IT industry right now. And it's an area where innovative startups seem to have a competitive edge over the major, established IT vendors. What's more, the vendors on this list know the value of a good partnership and either have a serious commitment to the channel or plan to leverage it as they "cross the chasm" and go mainstream with their bleeding-edge technologies.
Take a look at the hottest startups in the big data segment from the Emerging Vendors list for 2014. Altogether there are more than 80 startups in the big data/business intelligence space, so we've split them into two shows with vendors A-M included here and vendors N-Z in a slideshow to follow.
Aerospike
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Joe Gottlieb
Aerospike develops a real-time, flash-optimized NoSQL database for running high-performance applications. The in-memory database meets ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) requirements for reliable transaction processing. Earlier this year the database achieved performance of 1 million transactions per second on a single server with 50 million records.
Alpine Data Labs
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: President and CEO Joe Otto
Founded by former members of EMC's Greenplum team, Alpine Data Labs offers an advanced, Hadoop-based data analytics platform that makes 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.
Alteryx
Irvine, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Dean Stoecker
Alteryx's software blends structured and unstructured data from a range of sources into one database and conducts predictive, spatial and statistical analysis tasks. Alteryx 9.0, released in April, can tap into social media data feeds from DataSift, and sales and marketing data from Google Analytics and Marketo.
Appuri
Redmond, Wash.
Top Executive: CEO Damon Danieli
Appuri operates a cloud-based customer data system that captures customers' touchpoint data from internal and external sources and creates a petabyte-scale data warehouse within a dedicated, virtual private cloud.
Ayasdi
Menlo Park, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and 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.
BIME Analytics
Montpellier, France
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Rachel Delacour
BIME offers Business Intelligence-as-a-Service that analyzes data from any source and turns it into actionable information.
Chartio
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and 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 company raised $2.2 million in financing, in addition to the $4.4 million it raised in 2011.
Circonus
Fulton, Md.
Top Executive: CEO Theo Schlossnagle
Circonus develops a real-time telemetry collection platform, providing businesses with the ability to collect data from any system and apply monitoring, analytics, visualization and alerting tools against that data.
Cirro
Aliso Viejo, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Mark Theissen
Cirro develops a next-generation data federation platform that makes it possible for non-technical users to query and explore structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and perform complex analytical tasks. The company's products include the Cirro Data Hub, Cirro Analyst for Excel and Cirro Multi Store.
Citus Data
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Umur Cubukcu
Citus Data developed CitusDB, a distributed analytics database that can run SQL queries and, according to the company, process petabytes of data in seconds. CitusDB is based on Google Dremel, a real-time analytics database developed by the giant search company. Citus Data released CitusDB 3.0 in February.
ClearStory Data
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and 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.
Cloudera
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Tom Reilly
Cloudera markets Cloudera Enterprise, the vendor's distribution of the Hadoop platform, coupled with system management (Cloudera Manager) and data management (Cloudera Navigator) tools. On March 31 Cloudera closed on a whopping $900 million financing round, followed a few days later with the general release of Cloudera Enterprise 5.
Concurrent
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Gary Nakamura
Concurrent offers application middleware technology that businesses use to develop, deploy, run and manage big data applications. The company's products include the Cascading application development framework and Driven application performance management software.
Connectivity
Burbank, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Matt Booth
Connectivity develops Software-as-a-Service customer intelligence applications designed to help small businesses monitor and analyze customer interactions online – everything from customer reviews to social media comments. And it aggregates all that information into one dashboard that small businesses use to monitor what's being said about them.
Continuuity
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Jonathan Gray
One problem with Hadoop is the shortage of skilled developers capable of building applications that leverage its capabilities. Continuuity offers the Continuuity Reactor development engine Java that programmers use to build and deploy cloud-based, big data applications and the Continuuity Loom cluster management software.
Continuum Analytics
Austin, Texas
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Travis Oliphant
Continuum Analytics develops data analytics software based on the Python programming language. In February the 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.
Couchbase
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: President and CEO Bob Wiederhold
A player in the "alternative database" competition, Couchbase develops and supports Couchbase Server -- a commercial version of Apache CouchDB, the open-source, document-oriented NoSQL database. Backers pitch CouchDB as superior to traditional relational databases for managing unstructured data and cloud computing.
DataBricks
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Ion Stoica
Big data managed services provider Databricks Cloud has built a platform to help users "get started with big data in seconds." The platform is 100 percent open source, based on Apache Spark, the analytics cluster computing technology Databricks Cloud founders helped create. The product launched June 30.
DataGravity
Nashua, N.H.
Top Executive: CEO Paula Long
DataGravity remains in development mode and is expected to launch its first product this year. The company says it's developing a technology that will transform stored data into easily digestible information without the need for complex software packages. DavaGravity took the wraps off an early access channel program in February.
DataHero
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Chris Neumann
Under the motto of "Analytics Simplified," this company develops software that analyzes data and automatically creates visualizations -- charts and graphs -- from the information without the need for complex coding.
Datameer
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Stefan Groschupf
Founded 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 and earlier this year launched Datameer 4.0.
DataRPM
Fairfax, Va.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Sundeep Sanghavi
DataRPM develops "cognitive data discovery" technology that lets users analyze and visualize data residing in corporate databases, Hadoop or other sources using a natural language query and search interface. The company's software is available through the cloud or for on-premise.
DataSift
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Rob Bailey
DataSift develops a social data platform for monitoring social media such as Twitter, aggregating and filtering data from public social conversations, and extracting insights from that data. In December DataSift raised $42 million in Series C financing.
DataStax
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Billy Bosworth
DataStax developed a massively scalable data platform based on Apache Cassandra, the open-source distributed database for storing and managing huge amounts of data across multiple data centers and the cloud. The DataStax system also includes Apache Hadoop for analytics and Apache Solr for search.
DoMo
American Fork, Utah
Top Executive: Founder and 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 company was founded by James, previously the co-founder and longtime CEO of Omniture. In February the company raised $125 million in Series C financing.
Emotient
San Diego, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Ken Denman
Emotient develops emotion detection and sentiment analysis software that uses facial recognition technology to detect emotions such as joy, surprise, anger, contempt and more. Business customers use the technology to build systems for customer engagement, research and analysis, and other applications. In April the company raised $6 million in Series B financing.
Fluxx
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Jason Ricci
Fluxx develops a collaborative work platform that combines core CRM capabilities, data aggregation technology and grant management functionality into one system with a unified, real-time dashboard interface.
FoundationDB
Tysons Corner, Va.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO David Rosenthal
Founded in 2009 by Rosenthal, CTO David Scherer and COO Nick Lavezzo, FoundationDB has developed a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database that's capable of processing ACID transactions. The company is competing with mainstream relational database providers like Oracle and Microsoft.
Gainsight
Mountain View, Calif.
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 tasks and identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
GenieDB
San Juan Capistrano, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Cary Breese
GenieD provides the MySQL database as a cloud service, making it possible to distribute applications running on the database across large geographic distances. In March the company began offering its MySQL-as-a-Service through Amazon Web Services' AWS Marketplace.
Glassbeam
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and 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.
Hortonworks
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Rob Bearden
Hortonworks is one of the most visible big data startups, offering the Hortonworks Data Platform built around its own Hadoop distribution and related components. Earlier this month Hewlett-Packard invested $50 million in Hortonworks and said it would integrate the emerging vendor's software with the HP HAVEn big data platform.
JethroData
Natanya, Israel
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Eli Singer
JethroData develops an index-based SQL engine for Hadoop the company says combines the scalability of HDFS (the Hadoop file system) with the power of a fully indexed columnar analytical database.
Librato
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Fred van den Bosch
Librato develops a Software-as-a-Service platform for real-time operational monitoring, time series data analysis and alerts based on metrics that are important to a business.
MapR Technologies
San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO John Schroeder
MapR Technologies competes with Cloudera, Hortonworks and other vendors in the Hadoop arena, building on its distribution of Hadoop and other open-source Apache software to create a big data platform for both operational and analytical purposes. In June the company closed on $110 million in financing from Google Capital and other investors.
MemSQL
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Eric Frenkiel
MemSQL develops a distributed, in-memory database that can handle real-time and historical data analytics. Earlier this year MemSQL unveiled version 3.0 of its software with an integrated, tiered storage architecture that allows the platform to scale to hundreds of terabytes.
Metric Insights
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Marius Moscovici
Metric Insights pitches its "push intelligence" technology as an antidote to business intelligence reports and dashboards that make users hunt for information. The Metrics Insight software delivers personalized business intelligence, key performance indicators and alerts.
Mixpanel
San Francisco, Calif.
Top Executive: Suhail Doshi
Mixpanel says it has developed the most advanced analytics platform for mobile computing and the Web.
Mortar Data
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.