Emerging Vendors 2014: Big Data Vendors (Part 2)
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 (founded in 2008 or since). Altogether, there are more than 80 startups in the big data/business intelligence space, so we've split them into two shows with vendors N-Z in this slideshow. Part one of that list can be found here.
Numerify
Cupertino, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Gaurav Rewari
Startup Numerify just emerged from "stealth mode" in April to debut its cloud-based IT Enterprise Analytics Platform. The application is built on ServiceNow's IT management software and collects and analyzes operational and financial data about an organization's IT systems, helping managers make decisions about IT assets and capacity.
0xdata
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO SriSatish Ambati
0xdata develops its H2O in-memory prediction engine software for conducting advanced statistical analysis against data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System. The goal is to make statistical analysis capabilities available to a wide audience of users.
Paradigm4
Waltham, Mass.
Top Executive: CEO Marilyn Matz
Paradigm4 develops the SciDB scalable array database with native complex analytics capabilities. SciDB is designed for analyzing massive volumes of data for complex problems in financial services, life sciences and other data-intensive industries. Database luminary Michael Stonebraker is the company's CTO.
ParStream
Cologne, Germany
Top Executive: CEO Peter Jensen
ParStream develops a distributed, columnar, massively parallel processing database that's designed to analyze and filter billions of records in subsecond time. The company has its U.S. headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and is expanding its U.S. operations.
Paxata
Redwood City, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Prakash Nanduri
Paxata offers "adaptive data preparation" technology that simplifies the work of transforming raw data into data that can be analyzed with business analytics tools such as QlikTech and Tableau. In March, In-Q-Tel, the CIA's strategic investment firm, invested an undisclosed amount in Paxata.
Pepperdata
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Sean Suchter
Pepperdata develops dynamic cluster supervisor software for monitoring and improving the performance of Hadoop systems. The software constantly monitors CPU, RAM, network, disk and Hadoop Distributed File System usage, providing better management of Hadoop jobs.
Pivotal
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Paul Maritz
Pivotal is the joint venture between storage giant EMC and VMware that offers a portfolio of big data products, including the Pivotal CF Platform-as-a-Service system, Pivotal Greenplum database, Pivotal HD Hadoop framework, the Cloud Foundry open-source PaaS, analytic applications such as MADlib, and more.
Platfora
San Mateo, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and 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. In June, the company said it had recorded 200 percent sales growth in recurring revenue during the previous 12 months.
Prism Skylabs
San Francisco
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Steve Russell
Prism Skylabs develops technology that helps retailers analyze video from in-store cameras to understand customer movement and behavior in order to improve merchandising efforts and store layouts. The company debuted Prism 2 in early July with advanced image search, reporting and collaboration capabilities.
Qubole
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Ashish Thusoo
Qubole develops a Hadoop-based big data platform, the Qubole Data Service, which runs in the cloud. Expectations are high for this company: Founders Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma built and ran Facebook's data service and scaled it to more than 25 petabytes. They also created the Apache Hive open-source data warehouse technology.
Renovo
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Top Executive: President Maureen Okerstrom
Renovo develops browser-based financial reporting software that streamlines the design, compilation and distribution of financial information. Applications include Renovofyi, a financial report writer; Cloudfyi, a SaaS-based financial reporting tool; Currencyfyi, a currency translation application; and Connectfyi, a general ledger integration tool.
RJMetrics
Philadelphia
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Robert Moore
RJMetrics develops business intelligence software delivered as a web service. This month, the company debuted a new release of its product that provides a way for online businesses to collect data from transactional systems, maintain a data warehouse and perform sophisticated analysis using the data.
Rubikloud Technologies
Toronto
Top Executive: Co-founder and CEO Kerry Liu
This year-old startup has developed a cloud-based, realtime data analytics platform for processing, analyzing and searching continuous streams of data. The company's stated mission is "to turn data into revenue" and is now working with early adopter customers with its product.
SalesPredict
San Francisco
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Yaron Zakai-Or
SalesPredict offers predictive analysis applications that businesses use to identify the best customer prospects. The technology collects data from a company's CRM and marketing automation systems, along with social media, proprietary data feeds and other sources, to uncover hidden leads that are likely to convert to sales.
ScaleArc
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: President and CEO Justin Barney
ScaleArc develops database traffic management software that eliminates both planned and unplanned downtime for applications in database environments. The ScaleArc software sits between the database and the application, providing IT managers with increased database availability and performance. The company raised $12.3 million in Series C financing in January 2013.
Seeq
Seattle
Top Executive: Founder and 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 aiding with operational continuous improvement.
Sensitel
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO M.S. "Ray" Sikka
Sensitel develops software that collects data from embedded sensors, the kind found in everything from smartphones to GPS devices, and analyzes it to help companies garner insights into their business.
Simularity
Point Richmond, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Liz Derr
Simularity develops predictive analysis applications for market analysis, customer segmentation, risk analysis and other analytical tasks. The software works on both streaming and historical data collected from many sources.
SiSense
Tel Aviv, Israel
Top Executive: CEO Amit Bendov
SiSense develops analytics, reporting, visualization and dashboard software that helps everyday users make sense of huge volumes of data. One of the product's key capabilities is its ability to join huge data sets from multiple sources and combine them into one database for analysis. In June, the company raised $30 million in Series C financing.
Skytree
San Jose
Top Executive: Co-Founder, President and CEO Martin Hack
Skytree calls itself "the machine learning company." Its flagship Skytree Server is a machine-learning platform that applies advanced predictive analytics to massive, fast-changing data sets. In April, the company said its booked revenue had grown more than 300 percent on an annual basis since its 2012 launch.
Spire Technologies
Bangalore, India
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Saurabh Jain
Spire Technologies develops the SpiroBot Big Data processing engine and contextual search platform, which the company says bridges the gaps between collected data and the organizational context in which it is analyzed by a business.
Splice Machine
San Francisco
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Monte Zweben
In May, Splice Machine launched its long-awaited Hadoop realtime relational database that's designed to get around Hadoop's batch-analytics limitations, providing a full-featured, transactional SQL database on Hadoop that can run operational applications and realtime analytics. Splice Machine pitches itself as an alternative to traditional relational databases from Oracle and Microsoft.
Sqrrl
Cambridge, Mass.
Top Executive: CEO Mark Terenzoni
Sqrrl develops Sqrrl Enterprise, a secure, big data platform for building realtime apps that can analyze tens of petabytes of structured, semistructured or unstructured data. The company's founders came from the National Security Agency and helped develop that organization's massive database.
SumAll
New York
Top Executive: CEO Dane Atkinson
SumAll offers an online analytics platform that lets users visualize data from 42 (and counting) business data, social media and e-commerce sites, including Facebook, Twitter, eBay and Instagram, in one intuitive, interactive chart. The vendor aims its technology toward small and midsize businesses.
Sumo Logic
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: President and 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 realtime, providing actionable insights for IT operations, application management, and security and compliance managers.
TempoDB
Chicago
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Andrew Cronk
TempoDB offers a database service designed for handling time-series data, a task many databases have trouble with. Time series data includes things like thermostat temperatures, heart rates and network latency statistics. Applications include energy and smart grid management, server and network monitoring, and social media monitoring.
Tidemark Systems
Redwood City, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Christian Gheorghe
Tidemark Systems develops a cloud-based enterprise performance management platform, and financial and operational business planning and analytics applications. Tidemark EPM is built on Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop, allowing it to extract value from massive volumes of complex data.
Treasure Data
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder, CEO and CFO Hiro Yoshikawa
Treasure Data offers a cloud-based data warehouse (data analytics Platform-as-a-Service) that operates on a subscription model. The idea is to provide sophisticated data warehouse capabilities to businesses without the huge costs and development times associated with on-premise systems.
Trifacta
San Francisco
Top Executive: CEO Adam Wilson
Trifacta develops its Predictive Interaction data transformation technology that organizations use to transform raw, complex data into clean, structured formats for analysis. Wilson, co-founder and COO at Zimba, just took over the CEO post from previous CEO and Co-Founder Joe Hellerstein, who now serves as chief strategy officer.
Unmetric
New York
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Lakshmanan Narayan
Unmetric provides social media analysis services, providing customers with insights about their company brands, as well as competitive intelligence services on some 10,000 brands on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and other sites.
VersaReports
Atlanta
Top Executive: President Andy Feibus
Report servers are portals for back-end reporting engines that businesses use to schedule and manage the dissemination of reports to managers and employees. VersaReports' ReportServer works with any report designer, including Crystal Reports, DevExpress XtraRepors and Telerik Reporting.
Versium
Redmond, Wash.
Top Executive: CEO Chris Matty
Versium operates its LifeData predictive analytics system that collects publicly available data about consumers, including demographic, psychographic and social-graphic information, and combines it with information a business may already have, such as a customer's spending history, to create a detailed profile of that customer.
Visier
Vancouver, B.C.
Top Executive: Founder and CEO John Schwarz
Visier develops workforce analytics and planning applications, software that businesses use to better gauge their workforce needs. Visier's cloud-based software, with its predictive capabilities, helps organizations attract and retain employees, improve productivity and reduce workforce-related costs.
WebAction
Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: President and CEO Ali Kutay
WebAction's platform enables realtime, data-driven applications by collecting, processing and delivering structured and unstructured data. The company also offers a number of its own realtime applications for consumer analytics, risk and fraud management, and security event processing.
WibiData
San Francisco
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Christophe Bisciglia
WibiData's software helps businesses develop predictive customer-facing applications on the Hadoop platform. That, according to WibiData, will help businesses derive more value from big data. Bisciglia, founder of Hadoop software developer Cloudera, founded WibiData in 2010.
Wise.io
Berkeley, Calif.
Top Executive: CEO Jeff Erhardt
Wise.io develops data-driven applications that use machine-learning technologies to generate predictions for such business processes as customer service optimization (including customer acquisition, monetization and retention), fraud detection and industrial safety.
Xplenty
Tel Aviv, Israel
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Yaniv Mor
Xplenty offers a cloud-based data integration service running on Hadoop, providing an alternative to using on-premise data ETL (extract, transform, load) tools to integrate structured and unstructured data. The startup also is competing against Amazon's Elastic Map Reduce Service.
Zettaset
Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive: President and CEO Jim Vogt
Zettaset's Orchestrator software, which supports Hadoop distributions from multiple vendors, simplifies big data security and management within Hadoop deployments. In February, Zettaset was granted a patent for its "split brain resistant fail-over" in high availability technology for Hadoop, a core component of Orchestrator.
Zoomdata
Reston, Va.
Top Executive: Founder and 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.