55 Big Data Startups To Watch In 2016
The Ones To Watch In Big Data
With businesses drowning in data demand is soaring for new technologies to handle the big data Tsunami, everything from next-generation databases, to tools and platforms for integrating and accessing data, to business analytics software to derive value from that data.
The market for business analytics software alone is expected to soar from $16.9 billion this year to $21.4 billion by 2020, according to the Gartner market research firm.
While established IT vendors like Microsoft, IBM and SAP are players in the big data arena, the market's rapid growth has attracted a slew of startup companies in recent years.
Alation
Top Executive: CEO Satyen Sangani
Alation exited stealth last year, debuting its enterprise data-accessibility platform that's designed to help people more easily find, understand, use and govern their data for making faster and better decisions.
Alation said its platform combines elements of machine learning with human insight to capture information about what the data describes, where it comes from, who's using it and how it's being used. The company's key executives and technologists came from Oracle, Google, Apple and other IT companies.
Based in Redwood City, Calif., Alation was founded in 2012.
Big Data Business Analytics
Working with big data remains one of the biggest IT challenges that businesses, government agencies and other organizations face today. It's also one of the biggest opportunities for IT vendors and for solution and strategic service providers. The big data market grew 23.5 percent to $22.6 billion in 2015, according to market researcher Wikibon, and will grow at an annual compound growth rate of 14.4 percent to $92.2 billion in 2026.
The CRN editorial team has created the fourth annual Big Data 100, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help business work with big data.
We've broken the 100 into three categories: business analytics, data management and big data platforms and tools, with a slide show devoted to each. Some IT vendors compete in more than one category, in which case we've assigned them to the group in which they are most prominent.
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. Slide shows of companies with big data management technologies and companies that provide big data platforms and tools will follow this week.
Algorithmia
Top Executive: CEO Diego Oppenheimer
Algorithmia operates an online marketplace for big data algorithms that software developers use to assemble big data applications. The algorithms range from text analysis and machine learning to utilities and computer vision.
Need an algorithm that can detect faces in images? One that can deduce the sentiment associated with particular words in a document? A dating algorithm for matching people online? Algorithmia has them all.
The Seattle-based company was founded in December 2013. It was the winner of the Startup Showcase at the Strata + Hadoop World show in September.
Big Data Business Analytics
Working with big data remains one of the biggest IT challenges that businesses, government agencies and other organizations face today. It's also one of the biggest opportunities for IT vendors and for solution and strategic service providers. The big data market grew 23.5 percent to $22.6 billion in 2015, according to market researcher Wikibon, and will grow at an annual compound growth rate of 14.4 percent to $92.2 billion in 2026.
The CRN editorial team has created the fourth annual Big Data 100, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help business work with big data.
We've broken the 100 into three categories: business analytics, data management and big data platforms and tools, with a slide show devoted to each. Some IT vendors compete in more than one category, in which case we've assigned them to the group in which they are most prominent.
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. Slide shows of companies with big data management technologies and companies that provide big data platforms and tools will follow this week.
Algorithmia
Top Executive: CEO Diego Oppenheimer
Algorithmia operates an online marketplace for big data algorithms that software developers use to assemble big data applications. The algorithms range from text analysis and machine learning to utilities and computer vision.
Need an algorithm that can detect faces in images? One that can deduce the sentiment associated with particular words in a document? A dating algorithim for matching people online? Algorithmia has them all.
The Seattle-based company was founded in December 2013. It was the winner of the Startup Showcase at the Strata + Hadoop World show in September.
Alpine Data Labs
Top Executive: President and CEO Joe Otto
Alpine Data Labs offers Chorus, an advanced, Hadoop-based data analytics platform that's used for analytical tasks in such areas as financial services and healthcare.
San Francisco-based Alpine Data Labs, launched in 2011, was recognized as a "visionary" in Gartner's 2016 magic quadrant for advanced analytics platforms.
Alteryx
Top Executive: CEO Dean Stoecker
Alteryx develops "self-service" tools for data blending, business intelligence and advanced analytics – the self-service aspect means that data analysts can perform data preparation, combining and analysis tasks without assistance from the IT department.
Founded in 2010, Irvine, Calif.-based Alteryx has close relationships with Microsoft and Tableau, whose front-end data visualization software products work with the Alteryx platform. Alteryx was also recognized as a "visionary" in Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms report.
Altiscale
Top Executive: CEO Raymie Stata
Altiscale, a provider of big data as a service, recently launched Altiscale Insight Cloud, a self-service analytics service that allows business analysts to rapidly query a data lake using familiar business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Excel without heavy involvement from the IT department.
In March Altiscale, founded in 2012 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., established a strategic alliance with Tableau through which Altiscale customers can use Tableau's data visualization software in conjunction with Altiscale's services for data discovery applications.
Arcadia Data
Top Executive: CEO Sushil Thomas
Arcadia Data develops analytics software that helps businesses overcome the problem of getting value out of Hadoop-stored data. The Arcadia Converged Analytics Platform, a unified front-end visual analytics tool and business analytics platform, uses Hadoop as an operating system and directly accesses data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based company exited stealth last year with $11.5 million in Series A venture financing. CEO Sushil Thomas, along with other members of the company's startup team, came from such companies as Teradata, Aster Data, IBM and 3PAR.
AtScale
Top Executive: CEO Dave Mariani
AtScale's software makes it possible to use popular business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Qlik to access data stored in Hadoop clusters. The technology creates a semantic layer between Hadoop and third-party tools, essentially turning Hadoop into an online analytical processing server that can be tapped for multidimensional analysis.
In March the company unveiled the AtScale Intelligence Platform 4.0, which introduced some 100 new features and system enhancements, including the new AtScale Hybrid Query Service that natively supports both SQL and MDX query languages used by business intelligence tools.
Founded in 2013, AtScale is based in San Mateo, Calif.
Bedrock Data
Top Executive: CEO John Marcus
Bedrock Data offers a data integration Platform-as-a-Service that constantly reviews and automatically synchronizes data in IT systems to ensure consistent records across CRM, marketing automation, email, customer support and finance systems.
Boston-based Bedrock Data, founded in 2012, targets its iPaaS offering toward small and midsize businesses.
Platform And Tools Vendors
Business analytics and data management software may be the most visible components of a company's big data ecosystem. But underlying those systems are critical platforms, tools, cloud services and other infrastructure that keep everything running.
The CRN editorial team has created the fourth annual Big Data 100 list, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help businesses work with big data.
Here are 20 big data platform and tools companies offering everything from hardware servers, to software platforms and applications, to cloud-based services. Some, such as IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle, have broad product lines that also include analytics, data management and infrastructure technologies for tackling big data.
Altiscale
Top Executive: CEO Raymie Stata
Altiscale, a provider of big data as a service, recently launched Altiscale Insight Cloud, a self-service analytics service that allows business analysts to rapidly query a data lake using familiar business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Excel without heavy involvement from the IT department.
In March Altiscale, founded in 2012 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., established a strategic alliance with Tableau through which Altiscale customers can use Tableau's data visualization software in conjunction with Altiscale's services for data discovery applications.
Amazon Web Services
Top Executive: CEO Andy Jassy
Amazon Web Services has become the de facto data management system for many business applications. So it's no surprise that AWS has been on a meteoric growth rate and is expected to reach $10 billion in revenue this fiscal year after hitting $7.9 billion in fiscal 2015.
Last month AWS launched a database migration service that moves customers' on-premise Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases to the AWS cloud.
AWS also offers a host of business analytics services including the Redshift data warehousing, Quicksight business intelligence, Kinesis real-time streaming data and Elasticsearch services.
BlueData Software
Top Executive: CEO Kumar Sreekanti
BlueData's EPIC software uses Docker container technology to make it easier for businesses to leverage big data by enabling big data as a service in an on-premise model. They can quickly spin up virtual Hadoop or Spark clusters for on-demand access to data, applications and infrastructure at cost savings up to 75 percent of traditional approaches, according to the company.
BlueData, launched in 2012 and based in Santa Clara, Calif., recently debuted a real-time pipeline accelerator system that helps data scientists and analysts build real-time data pipelines using Spark Streaming, Kafka and Cassandra.
BlueTalon
Top Executive: CEO Eric Tilenius
BlueTalon provides data access control software for Hadoop, SQL and other big data environments. The BlueTalon Policy Engine specifically addresses Hadoop's security shortcomings by helping manage data access when departments and even individuals require different levels of authorization to view the same data.
BlueTalon, founded in 2013 and based in Redwood City, Calif., recently won the 2016 Cybersecurity Excellence Award for Data-Centric Security.
Cazena
Top Executive: CEO Prat Moghe
Startup Cazena's big data as a service moves data processing tasks to the cloud with just a few clicks, automating what traditionally is a long, complex process. The vendor's data lake as a service and DataMart as a service can provision and optimize cloud infrastructure and big data technologies such as Hadoop, MPP SQL and Spark.
Founded in 2014 and based in Waltham, Mass., Cazena exited stealth in July 2015. The company has attracted attention – and financing – because CEO Prat Moghe and board members Jit Saxena and Jim Baum were among the founders of Netezza, a pioneering developer of data warehouse appliances that IBM bought in 2010 for $1.7 billion.
ClearStory Data
Top Executive: CEO Sharmila Mulligan
ClearStory Data's software simplifies access to disparate internal and external data, including corporate and Web information sources such as Hadoop, relational databases and social media. The system automates data harmonization and enables interactive data analysis at scale.
In March ClearStory Data, founded in 2011 and based in Menlo Park, Calif., launched new data harmonization capabilities called "infinite data overlap detection" that detects and infers patterns and customer-specific data types in every source a user is connected to for analysis.
CognitiveScale
Top Executive: CEO Akshay Sabhikhi
Founded by some of the folks who developed IBM's Watson supercomputer, CognitiveScale develops big data interpretation and machine learning systems for decision-making and customer engagement purposes.
Last year CognitiveScale, founded in 2013 and based in Austin, launched its CognitiveCommerce cloud service targeting analytical applications for retailers.
Confluent
Top Executive: CEO Jay Kreps
Confluent offers a data platform, based on the Apache Kafka open-source messaging system, for collecting, managing and analyzing streaming data in real time – a major challenge in the worlds of big data and the Internet of Things.
Confluent was launched in September 2014 to provide technology and services that help businesses adopt and use Kafka. The company was co-founded by Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao, who created Kafka while working at LinkedIn.
In March the company launched the Confluent Partner Program to support the growing ecosystem of technology developers, systems integrators and consultants in the Kafka and Confluent market.
Continuum Analytics
Top Executive: CEO Travis Oliphant
Continuum Analytics develops Anaconda, an open-source analytics platform based on the Python programming language. The platform and related consulting services help organizations manage, analyze and visualize massive datasets.
In February Continuum Analytics, founded in 2011 and based in Austin, announced that advancements in Anaconda allowed the advanced analytics software to work with Hadoop clusters.
Couchbase
Top Executive: President, CEO Bob Wiederhold
Couchbase and other vendors in the crowded NoSQL database arena position their products as alternatives to the relational databases that dominate most data centers today. Their next-generation technologies can better handle the huge volumes of data and different data types that businesses are increasingly working with.
Couchbase's products include the Couchbase Server and Couchbase Mobile.
In March Couchbase, founded in 2011 and based in Mountain View, Calif., raised $30 million in Series F financing.
Databricks
Top Executive: CEO Ali Ghodsi
Databricks was founded in 2013 by the creators of Apache Spark, the open-source big data processing engine that turbocharges Hadoop. The San Francisco-based company develops commercial software and services around Spark, including the Databricks Cloud end-to-end hosted data platform that launched in June 2015.
In February Databricks unveiled the beta release of the community edition of its platform, a move designed to help businesses learn about working with Spark for free. General availability is expected by midyear.
DataGravity
Top Executive: CEO Paula Long
DataGravity develops technology that is at the nexus of storage, data management and business analytics.
The company's DataGravity Discovery Series data-aware storage systems are used by IT management and line-of-business to store, protect, search and govern their data. At the core of the systems is the DataGravity Engine that analyzes data as it is ingested, making it easier for administrators and business users to explore and use the data.
DataGravity was founded in 2012 and is based in Nashua, N.H.
DataRPM
Top Executive: CEO Sundeep Sanghavi
DataRPM provides its cognitive data science platform that automates machine learning in-cloud or on-premise, allowing businesses to build data systems for predictions and recommendations. Applications include predictive maintenance, product and content recommendations, and churn and conversion predictions.
Founded in 2012, the company is based in Redwood City, Calif.
DataStax
Top Executive: CEO Billy Bosworth
DataStax markets a commercial version of Apache Cassandra, the open-source NoSQL database designed to manage huge volumes of data across multiple data centers and the cloud, as well as providing a line of supporting administration, management, development and analysis tools.
In April DataStax expanded its product lineup by introducing DataStax Enterprise Graph, a scalable real-time graph data platform built for cloud applications that need to manage highly connected data.
Based in Santa Clara, Calif., DataStax was founded in 2010.
Data Management Vendors
The total amount of digitally stored data is expected to reach 40 Zettabytes by 2020, according to market researcher IDC, representing a 50-fold increase since 2010. That's 40 trillion Gigabytes or 5.2 Terabytes for every man, woman and child on earth.
Managing huge – and ever-growing – volumes of data is a significant challenge for businesses and IT executives. Thankfully, there have also been rapid developments in data management technology to help with that challenge.
The CRN editorial team has created the fourth annual Big Data 100, 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 30 data management technology companies offering everything from next-generation database software to advanced data integration technology.
Alation
Top Executive: CEO Satyen Sangani
Alation exited stealth last year, debuting its enterprise data-accessibility platform that's designed to help people more easily find, understand, use and govern their data for making faster and better decisions.
Alation said its platform combines elements of machine learning with human insight to capture information about what the data describes, where it comes from, who's using it and how it's being used. The company's key executives and technologists came from Oracle, Google, Apple and other IT companies.
Based in Redwood City, Calif., Alation was founded in 2012.
AtScale
Top Executive: CEO Dave Mariani
AtScale's software makes it possible to use popular business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Qlik to access data stored in Hadoop clusters. The technology creates a semantic layer between Hadoop and third-party tools, essentially turning Hadoop into an online analytical processing server that can be tapped for multidimensional analysis.
In March the company unveiled the AtScale Intelligence Platform 4.0, which introduced some 100 new features and system enhancements, including the new AtScale Hybrid Query Service that natively supports both SQL and MDX query languages used by business intelligence tools.
Founded in 2013, AtScale is based in San Mateo, Calif.
Attunity
Top Executive: CEO Shimon Alon
Attunity develops integration software that enables access, management, sharing and distribution of data across heterogeneous enterprise platforms and cloud systems.
In February, Burlington, Mass.-based Attunity launched Attunity Compose, an automated data warehouse system that's designed to speed time-to-analytics through the use of a model-based, agile approach that supports the complete cycle of building, populating and maintaining a data warehouse.
Bedrock Data
Top Executive: CEO John Marcus
Bedrock Data offers a data integration Platform-as-a-Service that constantly reviews and automatically synchronizes data in IT systems to ensure consistent records across CRM, marketing automation, email, customer support and finance systems.
Boston-based Bedrock Data, founded in 2012, targets its iPaaS offering toward small and midsize businesses.
Confluent
Top Executive: CEO Jay Kreps
Confluent offers a data platform, based on the Apache Kafka open-source messaging system, for collecting, managing and analyzing streaming data in real time – a major challenge in the worlds of big data and the Internet of Things.
Confluent was launched in September 2014 to provide technology and services that help businesses adopt and use Kafka. The company was co-founded by Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao, who created Kafka while working at LinkedIn.
In March the company launched the Confluent Partner Program to support the growing ecosystem of technology developers, systems integrators and consultants in the Kafka and Confluent market.
Couchbase
Top Executive: President, CEO Bob Wiederhold
Couchbase and other vendors in the crowded NoSQL database arena position their products as alternatives to the relational databases that dominate most data centers today. Their next-generation technologies can better handle the huge volumes of data and different data types that businesses are increasingly working with.
Couchbase's products include the Couchbase Server and Couchbase Mobile.
In March Couchbase, founded in 2011 and based in Mountain View, Calif., raised $30 million in Series F financing.
Top Executive: CEO Ali Ghodsi
Databricks was founded in 2013 by the creators of Apache Spark, the open-source big data processing engine that turbocharges Hadoop. The San Francisco-based company develops commercial software and services around Spark, including the Databricks Cloud end-to-end hosted data platform that launched in June 2015.
In February Databricks unveiled the beta release of the community edition of its platform, a move designed to help businesses learn about working with Spark for free. General availability is expected by midyear.
DataStax
Top Executive: CEO Billy Bosworth
DataStax markets a commercial version of Apache Cassandra, the open-source NoSQL database designed to manage huge volumes of data across multiple data centers and the cloud, as well as providing a line of supporting administration, management, development and analysis tools.
In April DataStax expanded its product lineup by introducing DataStax Enterprise Graph, a scalable real-time graph data platform built for cloud applications that need to manage highly connected data.
Based in Santa Clara, Calif., DataStax was founded in 2010.
DataTorrent
Top Executive: CEO Phu Hoang
DataTorrent markets a big data platform for unified stream and batch processing on Hadoop that enables users to process, monitor, analyze and act on big data in real time.
In April the Apache Software Foundation said that Apache Apex, an open-source implementation of the DataTorrent RTS core engine, had been designated a top-level project.
Based in San Jose, DataTorrent was founded in 2012.
Domo
Top Executive: CEO Josh James
Domo delivers a SaaS-based system that executives and managers use to integrate information from disparate sources, including applications, databases, spreadsheets and more, for decision-making tasks.
In March Domo, founded in 2010 and based in American Forks, Utah, launched its Buzz social collaboration system that works with its Business Cloud big data system. The company also debuted a mobile app that brings the Business Cloud to mobile devices.
Also in March the company raised a stunning $131 million in Series D funding, bringing the startup's valuation to more than $2 billion.
Gainsight
Top Executive: CEO Nick Mehta
Gainsight develops a series of business analysis applications used for customer retention tasks including managing the customer lifecycle, identifying cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and managing customer loyalty and churn risks.
Founded in 2011 and based Redwood City, Calif., Gainsight raised $50 million in Series D financing in November.
H2O.ai
Top Executive: CEO SriSatish Ambati
H2O.ai develops an open-source machine learning system for building analytical applications for everything from fraud detection to predicting customer churn.
In November H2O.ai, based in Mountain View, Calif., raised $20 million in Series B financing. The company was founded in 2011 as Oxdata and changed its name in 2014.
Hortonworks
Top Executive: CEO Rob Bearden
Hortonworks offers a range of big data management products built around its Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which is itself based on the Apache Hadoop system. It also develops the Hortonworks DataFlow software that collects and analyzes streaming data in real time.
For 2015 publicly held Hortonworks reported revenue of $121.9 million, up 165 percent from 2014.
Hortonworks is based in Santa Clara, Calif.
Infoworks
Top Executive: CEO Amar Arsikere
Startup Infoworks exited stealth mode in 2015 with the launch of its Infoworks Dynamic Data Warehousing platform, which runs on a single Hadoop cluster. The software automatically crawls enterprise databases, ingests data into Hadoop and keeps it synchronized. It also organizes the data into data warehouses, cubes and other data models for multiple use cases.
In September San Jose, Calif.-based Infoworks received $5 million in Series A financing. The company plans to develop additional software that runs on the DDW platform.
InsightSquared
Top Executive: CEO Fred Shilmover
InsightSquared offers sales performance and marketing analytics applications designed for fast-growing technology companies. The company recently began offering new connectors to more than 50 new data sources including marketing, finance, project management and customer support applications.
InsightSquared was founded in 2010 and is based in Boston.
Interana
Top Executive: CEO Ann Johnson
Interana markets behavioral analytics software that works with event data, including information about how customers behave and how they use a company's product. The software analyzes data generated by Web sites and mobile devices, Internet of Things endpoints and sensors, and call detail records – all focused on improving customer engagement and retention.
Interana was founded in 2013 and is based in Redwood City, Calif.
JethroData
Top Executive: CEO Eli Singer
Hadoop is a notoriously difficult system on which to run interactive queries. JethroData developed a SQL-on-Hadoop engine that acts as a business intelligence-on-Hadoop acceleration layer that speeds up big data queries from business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Qlik and MicroStrategy from any data source like Hadoop or Amazon S3.
The New York-based company debuted Jethro 1.6.0 in April with new concurrency and range-index features.
Kyvos Insights
Top Executive: CEO Praveen Kankariya
Kyvos Insights is one of a wave of startup companies that have developed technology that provides a way to analyze the increasingly huge volumes of data being stored within Hadoop clusters.
Kyvos' software specifically makes it possible to build OLAP (online analytical processing) cubes that tap into Hadoop data for multidimensional analysis. In March the company announced that the Kyvos software works with Azure HDInsight, Microsoft's cloud-based Hadoop system.
Kyvos Insights was started in 2012 and is based in Los Gatos, Calif.
Lavastorm
Top Executive: CEO Peter Shields
Calling itself the "agile analytics" company, Lavastorm, founded in 2012, offers tools for easily building analytical applications that scale up and extract, prepare and analyze data across multiple sources.
In April Boston-based Lavastorm released its Accelerators Library, an array of preconfigured components that make it easier to assemble analytic applications.
Looker
Top Executive: CEO Frank Bien
Looker's Web-based business intelligence platform provides access to data that resides either in a database or in the cloud. Last year the company debuted reusable, customizable components of business logic called Looker Blocks that can be assembled to create complete business analysis queries.
In January Looker closed a $48 million Series C round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The Santa Cruz, Calif.-based company was launched in 2011.
Luminoso Technologies
Top Executive: CEO Catherine Havasi
Luminoso, which has its roots in the MIT Media Lab, has developed technology that leverages machine learning and natural language processing to analyze text including emails, transcripts and social media posts. That, for example, can help a company better evaluate the market response to a product launch.
Based in Cambridge, Mass., Luminoso was founded in 2010.
MemSQL
Top Executive: CEO Eric Frenkiel
San Francisco-based MemSQL develops a distributed in-memory database that can process transactions and run analytics in real time using SQL.
In March the company debuted MemSQL 5 with a range of new technologies and enhanced capabilities to improve the software's database, data warehouse and streaming workload performances. The new release can merge transactions and analytics into a single database through its hybrid transaction/analytical processing technology that supports OLTP and OLAP queries.
In April MemSQL, founded in 2011, raised $36 million in Series C financing.
Metric Insights
Top Executive: CEO Marius Moscovici
Metric Insights markets what it calls "push technology" – software that tracks key performance indicators across multiple data sources, SaaS applications, big data platforms, business intelligence dashboards and more and sends them to a user's desktop or mobile device.
Metric Insights, founded in 2010 and based in San Francisco, launched Metric Insights Version 4.0 in February. The new edition offers a new Change Reports feature that captures significant data changes.
Numerify
Top Executive: CEO Gaurav Rewari
Numerify's cloud-based IT analytics applications track the performance of cloud-based IT services and systems, combining and analyzing data from IT sources, call centers, and HR and finance systems to help IT organizations lower costs and improve service levels.
Numerify, founded in 2012 and based in Cupertino, Calif., raised $37.5 million in Series C funding in October.
Paxata
Top Executive: CEO Prakash Nanduri
Paxata's Adaptive Data Preparation platform, built on Apache Spark and optimized to run in Hadoop environments, provides data integration, data quality, semantic enrichment, collaboration and governance capabilities.
The latest release of the Paxata platform improves the software's ability to provide users with connected information through advanced "filtergrams" for comprehensive data profiling. Also new is granular searching ability across columns of wide data sets and new options for data discovery with statistical selections. The release also includes new IT controls to improve system governance, security and scale.
Paxata, based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded in 2012.
Pepperdata
Top Executive: CEO Sean Suchter
Managing Hadoop environments can be a challenge. Pepperdata develops software tools for managing Hadoop clusters with hundreds and even thousands of nodes. The technology allows IT to monitor and control system usage to meet service-level agreements, increase data throughput and improve system visibility.
Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Pepperdata was founded in 2012.
Pivotal Software
Top Executive: CEO Rob Mee
EMC spinoff Pivotal, based in Palo Alto, Calif., offers a number of software products for the big data market within the Pivotal Big Data Suite. The major products include the Greenplum open-source massively parallel data warehouse system, the GemFire in-memory data grid system, and the Pivotal HDB Hadoop system – the latter based on Hortonworks' Hadoop software.
Platfora
Top Executive: President and CEO Jason Zintak
Platfora is a big data discovery platform that's built natively on Apache Hadoop and Spark. The system connects to an organization's data lake, including on-premise Hadoop clusters or cloud-based data stores, and pulls the data into an in-memory engine for transformation and analysis – especially for customer, security and IoT analytics.
Qubole
Top Executive: CEO Ashish Thusoo
Qubole develops the Qubole Data Service, a unified interface that helps users analyze data stored in cloud systems such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Qubole, founded in 2011 and based in Mountain View, Calif., raised $30 million in Series C funding in January.
Redis Labs
Top Executive: CEO Ofer Bengal
Redis Labs is the home and commercial provider of the open-source Redis high-performance, in-memory NoSQL "data structure store" that can perform as a database, caching layer or message broker for fast transactions and real-time analytics.
In January Redis Labs, based in Mountain View, Calif., said its revenue grew 300 percent in 2015. Gartner also positioned Redis Labs as a leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant Operational Database Management Systems report. The company also touts an Avon Consulting benchmarking test that found Redis to be the fastest NoSQL database.
Reltio
Top Executive: CEO Manish Sood
Reltio Cloud, launched in March last year, combines aspects of meta data management and NoSQL graph databases to create a platform for developing enterprise data-driven applications.
Based in Redwood Shores, Calif., Reltio was founded by the team that developed Informatica's MDM technology, along with big data folks from IBM, Salesforce and other companies.
SiSense
Top Executive: CEO Amir Orad
SiSense develops a business intelligence platform that the company said simplifies complex data preparation, analysis and visualization tasks with its ability to combine and analyze multiple, large, disparate data sets and sharing the results using dashboards.
In January SiSense closed on $50 million in Series D financing and the company said its sales in 2015 grew 100 percent for the fifth consecutive year.
SiSense, founded in 2010, is based in New York.
Snowflake Computing
Top Executive: CEO Bob Muglia
Startup Snowflake Computing began offering its cloud-based Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse service nearly one year ago, providing an alternative to traditional on-premise data warehouse systems that tend to be complex, expensive and time-consuming to build.
The company has actively established technology integration alliances with business analytics software vendors including MicroStrategy and Tableau.
Founded in 2012 and based in San Mateo, Calif., Snowflake Computing is run by former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia.
Splice Machine
Top Executive: CEO Monte Zweben
Splice Machine develops a Hadoop-based relational database that is more scalable than traditional RDBMS systems from Oracle, Microsoft and others, but still provides a familiar SQL interface for application developers – unlike many next-generation NoSQL databases.
In November 2015 the company debuted Splice Machine 2.0 with the ability to simultaneously perform transaction processing and business analytics tasks.
In January San Francisco-based Splice Machine, founded in 2012, received $9 million in Series C financing.
Striim
Top Executive: President, CEO Ali Kutay
Striim, pronounced "stream" with the "i’s" standing for integration and intelligence, was founded in 2012 by former executives from Golden Gate Software, Oracle, Informatica, WebLogic and other big-name data management companies.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's software combines streaming data integration and streaming operational intelligence in one system. That makes possible continuous query/processing and streaming analytics.
Striim raised $10 million in additional financing in March, bringing its total Series B funding to $30 million.
Sumo Logic
Top Executive: President and CEO Ramin Sayar
Sumo Logic provides a cloud-native machine data analytics service that the company says delivers real-time continuous intelligence across the entire application stack. The system collects and centralizes data from applications, cloud systems, servers, network devices and sensors.
While Sumo Logic is competing against Splunk in some areas, the company has found particular success in IT security applications.
In March Sumo Logic, founded in 2010 and based in Redwood City, Calif., said it surpassed 1,000 customers in fiscal 2015 and now analyzes nearly 100 petabytes of data daily.
Talena
Top Executive: CEO Nitin Donde
In March startup Talena debuted its Talena Rx predictive analytics software that incorporates machine-learning algorithms and data visualization to better administer big data management workloads and more accurately predict data availability.
The software also offers "active copy analytics" capabilities that businesses can use to turn idle backed-up data into useful assets.
Founded in 2013, Talena is based in San Jose, Calif.
Tamr
Top Executive: CEO Andy Palmer
Cambridge, Mass.-based Tamr developed a data unification platform that transforms "dark, dirty and disparate data" from hundreds and even thousands of data sources both inside and outside an organization into clean, connected data. The technology, for example, automatically catalogs all metadata associated with internal and external data sources and stores it in a central location.
In March the company announced that its product was compatible with Apache Spark.
Database industry veterans Andy Palmer and Michael Stonebraker started Tamr in 2013.
ThoughtSpot
Top Executive: CEO Ajeet Singh
Under the marketing mantra "search-based analytics for everyone," ThoughtSpot wants to eliminate the need for complex BI tools. The company's ThoughtSpot Relational Search Appliance combines data from on-premise, cloud and desktop sources, and provides users with the ability to access that data with a simple search interface.
ThoughtSpot, founded in 2012 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., launched its appliance product in October 2014. In December the company released ThoughtSpot 3 with some 200 new features across search, analytics and visualization.
Trifacta
Top Executive: CEO Adam Wilson
Trifacta develops "data wrangling" software for transforming raw, complex data into clean, structured formats for analysis – one of the biggest challenges in data analysis processes.
In March the San Francisco-based company launched the Photon Compute Framework, new technology at the core of the Trifacta software's user interface that provides users with a rich, interactive data exploration and transformation experience when working with large, in-memory data sets.
Trifacta was founded in 2012.
Wavefront
Top Executive: President and CEO Pete Cittadini
Wavefront develops a real-time analytics platform that businesses use to monitor and manage the performance of their IT systems, from cloud services, to applications, to networks. Using technology developed internally at Google and Twitter, Wavefront helps predict and prevent system downtime and diagnoses root causes of problems in real time.
Wavefront was founded in 2013 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif. In February the company raised $11.5 million in Series A financing. In April Wavefront hired former Actuate CEO Pete Cittadini as its new CEO.
Xplenty
Top Executive: CEO Yaniv Mor
Another player in the data integration platform market, Xplenty offers a cloud-based data integration platform that pulls together structured and unstructured data without any coding work. Running on Hadoop, Xplenty positions itself as an alternative to legacy ETL tools.
In January Xplenty added to its platform the ability to integrate data from Salesforce.com, Mixpanel, Intercom, Slack and PagerDuty.
Launched in 2011, Xplenty has headquarters in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Zoomdata
Top Executive: CEO Justin Langseth
Zoomdata develops big data analytics software, based on the company's Data Sharpening technique, for the visual analysis of real-time streaming and historical data. The Reston, Va.-based company also offers Zoomdata Fusion for joining big data with other data stores.
In February, Zoomdata said its 2015 annual recurring revenue bookings grew by a factor of 11 over 2014. In March the company raised $25 million in Series C funding, bringing its total since its 2012 launch to $47.2 million.