2015 Big Data 100: Business Analytics
Big Data Business Analytics
Big Data remains one of the IT industry's most significant megatrends. Revenue from big-data-related hardware and software products and services will reach $38.4 billion this year, according to market researcher Wikibon, and exceed $50 billion by 2017.
With that in mind, the CRN editorial team has created the second annual Big Data 100, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help businesses work with big data.
We've broken the 100 into three categories: Business Analytics (here), Data Management and Big Data Infrastructure, with a slideshow devoted to each. (Along with some Emerging Big Data Vendors.) 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 45 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 infrastructure, tools and services will follow this week.
Alpine Data Labs
Top Executive: President and CEO Joe Otto
Alpine Data Labs offers an advanced, Hadoop-based data analytics platform. In October, the San Francisco-based company launched Alpine Chorus 5.0, a new release of its flagship product, with functionality for overseeing and managing analytics ecosystems and a framework that analysts and data scientists use for integrating technologies such as R and Spark.
Alteryx
Top Executive: CEO Dean Stoecker
Alteryx's software combines structured and unstructured data from multiple sources into one database, uses the data to conduct predictive, spatial and statistical analysis tasks, and then shares the results. The Irvine, Calif.-based company was founded in 2010.
In January, Alteryx debuted Alteryx Analytics 9.5 with new data-blending tools for working with Oracle databases and the Microsoft SQL Server database without the need for time-consuming SQL coding. In October, the company collected $60 million in Series B venture financing, and at the time reported that its customer base had grown 200 percent in the last year.
Attivio
Top Executive: CEO Stephen Baker
Attivio is a major player in the area of "unified information access," developing next-generation search and discovery technology that integrates structured and unstructured information from such varied sources as ERP and CRM systems, emails, content management systems and social media networks.
Attivio, founded in 2007 and based in Newton, Mass., promoted COO Stephen Baker to CEO in December, succeeding founder and CEO Ali Riaz. In February, the company unveiled Attivio 4.3 with new functionality that makes it easier to build, deploy and manage contextually relevant applications.
Ayasdi
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Gurjeet Singh
Ayasdi's Insight Discovery Platform combines "topological data analysis" technology with machine learning techniques to provide users with insights for solving complex problems without writing code or queries.
Ayasdi, founded in 2008 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., raised $55 million in March in a Series C round of financing led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company also reported 400 percent growth in customer bookings in 2014.
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 and can be used by information workers on a self-service basis.
San Francisco-based Birst, founded in 2004, is a significant player in the business intelligence software channel. In March, the company announced a $65 million Series F round of funding, bringing the company's total financing to $129 million. In April, Birst struck a technology partnership with Tableau Software to integrate the two vendors' software, making it possible to refine and unify data using Birst's cloud BI platform and then analyze it with Tableau's visual analytics tools.
Continuum Analytics
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Travis Oliphant
Continuum Analytics, founded in 2011, develops data analytics software based on the Python programming language. In October, the Austin, Texas-based company said its Anaconda Server would move to the Hadoop and Spark infrastructures. A few weeks earlier, the company debuted Anaconda 2.1, a new release of the company's flagship technology.
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.
In February, Datameer launched Datameer Professional, a Hadoop-as-a-Service big data analytics platform specifically designed for departmental deployments. The product complements the San Mateo, Calif.-based company's on-premise Datameer Enterprise offering.
DataRPM
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Sundeep Sanghavi
DataRPM's Smart Machine Insights platform uses machine learning to automatically perform advanced statistical analysis on Hadoop -- the only practical way to approach analytics across large data sets, according to the company.
DataRPM was founded in 2012 and is based in Fairfax, Va. In February, the company announced version 8.0 of its software, a release that runs natively within Hadoop. In January, Cloudera co-founder and CTO Amr Awadallah invested in DataRPM and joined the company as a "super adviser."
Datawatch
Top Executive: President and CEO Michael Morrison
Datawatch develops visual data discovery applications for creating data visualizations in realtime from structured, semistructured and Hadoop-based data. Datawatch was founded in 1985 and is based in Chelmsford, Mass.
In March, the company delivered the Datawatch Managed Analytics Platform for self-service data preparation and visual data discovery. The company said the software bridges the gap between providing ease-of-use for information workers and the scalability, automation and governance capabilities needed by IT.
Domo
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Josh James
Domo has officially been in stealth mode since its 2010 start. But in April, the company debuted its cloud-based executive management system that provides business managers with access to information scattered across many disparate sources through a single dashboard.
On the same day of its launch, the American Fork, Utah-based company closed on an eye-popping $200 million Series D round of funding, bringing its total financing to more than $448 million and putting its market valuation at more than $2 billion. Company founder and CEO Josh James was previously the co-founder and longtime CEO of Omniture.
Gainsight
Top Executive: CEO Nick Mehta
Gainsight develops cloud-based predictive analytics software that's integrated with Salesforce.com's CRM applications to help users scrutinize customer data for customer-retention purposes and identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
In February, the Redwood City, Calif. company, founded in 2009, said its revenue increased 357 percent in 2014 and its customer base grew to 150. The company raised $25 million in Series C funding in October 2014.
Glassbeam
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Puneet Pandit
Glassbeam, founded in 2009, develops Software-as-a-Service applications for machine log data analytics, putting it in a key position in business intelligence in the nascent-but-growing "Internet of Things" market.
In November, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Glassbeam debuted a new release of its Glassbeam SCALAR product that's integrated with the Apache Spark processing engine. It also offered new advanced machine learning capabilities and realtime analytics.
GoodData
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Roman Stanek
GoodData markets a cloud-based business intelligence and big data analytics platform. In September, the company unveiled updates to its Extensible Analytics Engine software that boosted its predictive analytics capabilities and introduced automation and visualization software development kits.
San Francisco-based GoodData, founded in 2007, raised $25 million in October in a Series E round of funding led by Intel Capital.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Larry Page
With its stated mission of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful, Google is involved in numerous big data technology areas. In June, for example, the company debuted Google Cloud DataFlow, a service that provides data preparation and integration capabilities and can be used to examine realtime streams of data to detect patterns.
CRN is listing Mountain View, Calif.-based Google in the business analytics category because of the company's Google BigQuery analytics-as-a-service technology for performing SQL-like queries against massive amounts of data.
Guavas
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Anukool Lakhina
Guavus develops the Guavus Reflex Operational Intelligence Platform data analytics system and a suite of operational intelligence applications that analyze both streaming data and stored data. The goal is to help businesses in data-intensive industries make better decisions around business processes.
The company's platform processes more than half a trillion records every day. Guavus, for example, now counts the six largest North American mobile network operators, with a total of more than 370 million subscribers, among its customers.
Guavus was founded in 2006 and is based in San Mateo, Calif.
H2O
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO SriSatish Ambati
H2O, founded in 2011 as Oxdata, develops an open-source, in-memory prediction engine for data scientists and developers. In November, the company changed its name to match that of its flagship product.
In October, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company partnered with Cloudera and Databricks to create Sparkling Water, software that combines the startup's H2O technology with Apache Spark.
Information Builders
Top Executive: President and 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 March, New York-based IBI launched Omni-Gen, a software system that accelerates the deployment of master data management and data integration applications. In March, the company hired channel management veteran Tom Villani as its new vice president of business development and strategic alliances, overseeing expansion initiatives within IBI's channel and partner network.
InsightSquared
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Fred Shilmover
InsightSquared develops business analytics software for sales and marketing professionals with an emphasis on simplicity and ease-of-use. While the company's software is used by large businesses, the vendor also is winning over small and midsize businesses that often lack the resources to adopt business analytics technology.
InsightSquared, founded in 2010 and based in Cambridge, Mass., raised $13.5 million in Series C financing in November. At the time, the company said its revenue was growing at "well over 100 percent" in 2014.
Interana
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Ann Johnson
Interana, which just exited stealth mode last fall, develops events-based analytical software that works with clickstream data and other information to help users answer questions about how customers behave and how products are used. The goal is to provide actionable business intelligence for nontechnical users.
Interana, founded in 2013 and based in Menlo Park, Calif., raised $20 million in Series B financing in January.
Knime
Top Executive: President Michael Berthold
Knime consistently comes out among the top players in advanced analytics/data mining market perspectives, such as Gartner's Magic Quadrant. The company develops an open-source desktop analytics software and a commercial server edition, the Knime Analytics Platform, with additional capabilities.
The Zurich-based company's customers tend to be in data-intensive areas such as life sciences, communications and banking, according to Gartner. The company was founded in 2004.
Logi Analytics
Top Executive: President and CEO Brett Jackson
Logi Analytics offers a web-based reporting and data visualization platform that IT developers use to build business intelligence applications and dashboards, and to embed BI functionality within applications.
The company, started in 2000, is based in McLean, Va.
Looker Data Sciences
Top Executive: CEO Frank Bien
Looker develops a web-based business intelligence platform for data-driven companies. The software uses the company's own LookML data description language that businesses use to build customer data applications that work with Amazon Redshift, Teradata Aster, HP Vertica, Greenplum, Google BigQuery and other big data systems.
Looker founder and current operational adviser Marc Randolph was previously a co-founder of Netflix. Looker, which launched in 2011, recently said it experienced 400 percent growth in 2014 and, as of March, had more than 250 customers. In March, the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based company raised $30 million in Series B financing.
Luminoso Technologies
Top Executive: CEO Catherine Havasi
A spin-out from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Luminoso is a pioneer in the area of text analytics. The company's software is designed to help businesses understand what customers feel about their company or product by analyzing, say, tweets or Facebook postings.
Luminoso, founded in 2010 and based in Cambridge, Mass., raised $6.5 million in Series A funding last July.
Metric Insights
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Marius Moscovici
Metric Insights develops its "push intelligence" technology as an antidote to business intelligence reports and dashboards that make users hunt for information, according to the company. The Metrics Insights software uses a patented "KPI warehouse" to deliver personalized business intelligence, key performance indicators and alerts.
San Francisco-based Metric Insights, founded in 2010, raised $3.8 million in seed funding in March. It won first place at last October's O'Reilly + Hadoop World Startup Showcase.
MicroStrategy
Top Executive: CEO Michael Saylor
MicroStrategy, founded in 1989, is one of the industry's largest business intelligence software companies with 2014 revenue of $579.8 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 April, MicroStrategy, based in Tysons Corner, Va., launched the on-premise version of MicroStrategy Usher, a platform that provides advanced security and analytics for business processes and systems.
Numerify
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Gaurav Rewari
Startup Numerify emerged from "stealth mode" in April 2014 and began marketing its IT Enterprise Analytics Platform, a cloud-based analytics application built on ServiceNow's IT management software that collects and analyzes operational and financial data about an organization's IT systems. IT manages the Numerify system to monitor system performance, and make decisions about IT assets and capacity.
In February, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company unveiled enhancements to its Numerify360 for IT system. The company also said that in 2014 it had rapidly grown its ServiceNow customer base and recorded triple-digit revenue growth.
Palantir Technologies
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Alex Karp
Founded in 2004, Palantir develops advanced data analytics and data mining software for analyzing huge volumes of data. The company boasts that its technology is used to tackle the most complex problems, ranging from fraud detection and antiterrorism applications to tracking disease outbreaks and spotting trends in financial trading data.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Palantir 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. In April, the company announced that Necto 14 had been integrated with Microsoft's SQL Server 2014 database.
ParStream
Top Executive: CEO Peter Jensen
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, founded in 2008 and based in Cologne, Germany, has its U.S. headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
More recently, ParStream has been focusing on analytics for the nascent Internet-of-Things (IoT) arena, debuting in March a new release of the ParStream Analytics Platform that's purpose-built to handle the high volumes and velocity of IoT data.
Platfora
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Ben Werther
Platfora offers a big data analytics toolset that's native to the Apache 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.
In February, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company, founded in 2011, said it recorded 210 percent growth in recurring revenue in 2014. In April, the company debuted Platfora Big Data Analytics for Security, technology that conducts petabyte-scale analysis of data for investigating attacks against IT systems.
Predixion Software
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Simon Arkell
Predixion offers a cloud-based, self-service predictive analytics platform called Predixion Insight that's designed for business analysts and other nontechnical users.
In October, the company released Predixion Insight 4.0, which the company said expands predictive capabilities across a wider variety of production environments, such as applications, databases, data stores, realtime engines, devices and machines.
Founded in 2009, Predixion is based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., with development offices in Redmond, Wash.
Qlik
Top Executive: CEO Lars Bjork
Qlik 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 hundreds of channel and OEM partners worldwide.
In February, Qlik acquired Vizubi and its NPrinting report generation, distribution and scheduling applications for QlikView. The software allows users to create reports in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Office, PDF and HTML using data and analytics from QlikView.
Qlik, founded in 1993 and based in Radnor, Pa., racked up sales of $557 million in 2014.
RapidMiner
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Ingo Mierswa
RapidMiner offers a predictive analytics, machine learning and data mining platform for data scientists, business analysts and developers. RapidMiner said its software simplifies query and analytics tasks for a wide range of users because of its code-free development architecture that uses prebuilt models.
Cambridge, Mass.-based RapidMiner, founded in 2007, is one of the hottest companies in the advanced analytics arena right now. The company was tagged as a market leader in Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for advanced analytics and it raised $15 million in Series B financing in February.
RapidMiner works closely with business and technical channel partners, including VARs and systems integrators. In late April, the company added a dozen more companies to its partner roster, including PI-Cube and WekaMine in the U.S., Aviation Analytics in the U.K. and Sormen Solutions in Singapore.
Rubikloud Technologies
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Kerry Liu
Rubikloud targets the retail industry with its cloud-based, realtime data analytics platform for processing, analyzing and searching continuous streams of data from multiple sources. The goal is marketing optimization, customer optimization, product optimization and pricing optimization.
In January, the Toronto-based company raised $7 million in Series A financing, added to $1.5 million in earlier seed funding. The new financing is being used to build up the core engineering and data science team, and expand marketing operations in North America and China. The company was founded in 2013.
Salesforce.com
Top Executive: CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce.com's core product lines remain its cloud CRM and salesforce automation applications. But Benioff and company understand how important business analytics has become to sales and marketing. So at last year's Dreamforce conference, Salesforce launched its Salesforce Analytics Cloud application based on the company's Wave business analytics and data visualization technology.
While tightly linked with Salesforce's own applications, Analytics Cloud -- which the company touts as "analytics for the rest of us" -- is capable of integrating data from many sources for analysis. In April, executives at San Francisco-based Salesforce said demand for the analytics application has been strong, although sales numbers haven't been disclosed.
SAP
Top Executive: CEO Bill McDermott
SAP remains a business intelligence software market-share leader, as it has since it acquired Business Objects in 2007. But the company has continued to add to its business analytics lineup through acquisitions, such as predictive analysis software developer KXEN in 2013, and through continued development of such products as the Lumira data visualization application.
SAP also markets its HANA in-memory data engine as a platform for its business analytics products. The challenge for Waldorf, Germany-based SAP is staying on top against the new generation of BI tools such as Qlik and Tableau.
SAS Institute
Top Executive: CEO Jim Goodnight
SAS, founded in 1976, remains the biggest independent developer of business analytics software. It also remains the industry leader in advanced analytics, according to Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant, and a leader in the Magic Quadrant for business intelligence and analytics platforms.
Privately held SAS, based in Cary, N.C., recorded sales of $3.09 billion in 2014.
SiSense
Top Executive: CEO Amir Orad
SiSense offers business intelligence and dashboard applications that business users employ 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.
Originally based in Tel Aviv, Israel, SiSense named Orad to be the company's new CEO in February, effectively moving the company's headquarters to New York. Orad succeeded Amit Bendov, who had led the company since its 2010 launch. SiSense tripled its subscription revenue in 2014 for the fourth straight year and Orad's appointment, according to the company, will help maintain that momentum.
In August, the company named Mark Ferretti to be its first channel chief, officially the company's vice president of global alliances and channels.
Splunk
Top Executive: President and CEO Godfrey Sullivan
Splunk develops operational intelligence software for monitoring, reporting and analyzing realtime machine data, as well as historical data stored on-premise or in the cloud. The technology has applications in a wide range of areas from IT management, to security, to Internet-of-Things operations.
San Francisco-based Splunk saw its sales grow 48 percent in fiscal 2015 (ended Jan. 31) to more than $147 million. In April, the company began offering the Splunk Cloud through nine Amazon Web Services global regions.
Sumo Logic
Top Executive: President and CEO Ramin Sayar
Sumo Logic is directly challenging Splunk, 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.
Sumo Logic was founded in 2010 and is based in Mountain View, Calif. In December, the company named former Hewlett-Packard and VMware executive Ramin Sayar to be its new CEO, replacing Vance Loiselle, who stepped down for family reasons.
Tableau Software
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Christian Chabot
Tableau is one of the most visible of the new generation of business intelligence software, thanks to its successful initial public offering in 2013. Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for business intelligence and analytics platforms puts the company at No. 1 for its ability to execute.
Seattle-based Tableau, founded in 2003, offers server, desktop and cloud business analytics applications that are easy to use, and yet provide sophisticated visualization capabilities. In early April, the company released Tableau 9.0 with "auto data prep" features to more easily clean up messy data, the ability to update information within workflows without interruption, and new geographic "smart maps" capabilities.
ThoughtSpot
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Ajeet Singh
Under the 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. Four months earlier in June, the startup raised $30 million in Series B financing.
TiBCO Software
Top Executive: CEO Murray Rode
TIBCO, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is a broad-based software vendor with products for event processing, application integration and cloud management. The company initially became a player in the business analytics space in 2007 when it acquired Spotfire, a sophisticated data discovery and interactive analytics tool. TIBCO expanded its BI market presence in April 2014 when it bought Jaspersoft, a developer of open-source business analytics and reporting, production reporting, cloud analytics and mobile BI tools.
In March, TIBCO debuted Spotfire 7, with new automated analysis guidance capabilities that guide users through the data discovery process.
Rode was named TIBCO's CEO in December after the company was taken private through an acquisition by Vista Equity Partners.
Visier
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO John Schwarz
Visier, founded in 2010 and based in Vancouver, B.C., brings business analytics to the realm of human resources management. The company's cloud-based applications pull together data about a company's workforce -- everything from salaries to skillsets -- and help managers with their workforce planning chores. It can help with succession planning and even identify critical employees who may be in danger of leaving.
Zoomdata
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Justin Langseth
Zoomdata develops software that allows users to connect, visualize and interact with data -- both realtime and historical data -- through browsers and mobile devices. Companies use Zoomdata's software to create dashboards and connect them to disparate data sources.
Zoomdata was founded in 2012 and is based in Reston, Va. In October 2014, the company received $17 million in Series B funding.