10 Big Data/Business Intelligence Emerging Vendors You Need To Know About
Under The Radar
Startups developing technology for collecting, analyzing and managing big data make up a disproportionate number of the companies on this year's CRN list of emerging vendors. That's not so surprising when you consider that big data is one of the hottest segments of the IT industry right now. Just take a look at recent venture funding announcements from such companies as Interana ($20 million in January), Looker ($30 million in March), Snowflake Computing ($45 million in June) and Domo (an astounding $200 million in April).
Here's a selection of 10 big data/business analytics startups from this year's CRN Emerging Vendors roundup. They may be developing groundbreaking technology, upsetting the business intelligence status quo or making a splash in the channel.
You might not have heard of them yet. But you will.
Arcadia Data
San Mateo, Calif.
Top executive: CEO Sushil Thomas
An increasing number of businesses are implementing Hadoop systems, using them to collect huge volumes of disparate data from multiple sources. But making use of that data isn't so easy -- most traditional business analytics tools can't directly access Hadoop data and IT departments have to step in to prepare the data or move it to another system to make it available for everyday business workers.
Arcadia Data is developing visual analytics software that overcomes those hurdles by directly accessing data stored in Hadoop clusters. The technology uses Hadoop as an operating system, allowing it to run directly on Hadoop servers and access data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System.
Arcadia launched Arcadia Instant, a free download of the data visualization tool, in June with plans to finish and ship the complete platform by the end of this year.
BlueDa ta Software
Mountain View, Calif.
Top executive: CEO Kumar Sreekanti
BlueData Software emerged from stealth mode last September, debuting its BlueData EPIC software platform, a virtualization technology to make it easier, faster and more cost effective to leverage big data and enable Hadoop-as-a-Service in an on-premises deployment model.
The company, founded by VMware veterans, says its technology makes it possible for businesses of all sizes to quickly build big data systems with cost savings of 50 percent to 75 percent compared with traditional approaches.
DataHero
San Francisco
Top executive: CEO Ed Miller
DataHero is focused on developing "self-service" business analytics software. The DataHero cloud-based service collects data from such disparate sources as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Excel, Office 365, Marketo, HubSpot and Eventbrite and turns it into charts and dashboards.
For the business analytics software industry, the challenge has been developing analytical applications that can be used by a broad range of everyday business users without a lot of assistance from the IT department. Data hero is among the few companies that's close to achieving that.
DataHero, founded in 2011, raised $6.1 million in Series A funding in May.
DataTorrent
Santa Clara, Calif.
Top executive: CEO Phu Hoang
DataTorrent develops the DataTorrent RTS unified enterprise-grade stream and batch processing system, based on Hadoop 2.0, that businesses use to process, monitor, analyze and act on big data in real time. In June the company made the DataTorrent RTS core engine available as open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license.
DataTorrent raised $15 million in Series B financing in April, bringing its total funding to $23.8 million.
Domo
American Fork, Utah
Top executive: CEO Josh James
Domo was in stealth mode between its 2010 founding and earlier this year. But in April the startup really got people's attention when it announced that it had raised $200 million in Series D funding, putting the company's total financing at around $450 million and its valuation at about $2 billion.
That news almost overshadowed the launch of the company's cloud-based executive management system, which provides business managers access to information scattered across many disparate sources through a single dashboard.
Looker
Santa Cruz, Calif.
Top executive: CEO Frank Bien
Looker provides a Software-as-a-Service business analytics platform that the company says puts actionable intelligence in the hands of the employees who need it most. The cloud-based tools can connect to a wide range of data sources including Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, HP Vertica, Cloudera Imapala, Apache Spark, SQL databases and others.
In May, the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based company began offering a "Powered by Looker" service that allowed businesses and cloud software developers to embed the Looker analytical functionality within any application, website or portal. The idea is that businesses and partners can quickly deploy data analytics tools to their own customers.
Snowflake Computing
San Mateo, Calif.
Top executive: CEO Bob Muglia
Snowflake Computing officially launched in October, debuting its cloud-based data warehousing services the startup is positioning as a more flexible, easier-to-manage alternative to traditional on-premise data warehouse systems. It's also competing with other cloud data warehouse offerings such as Amazon Web Service's Redshift and Google's Big Query.
The company, founded in 2012, has gained a lot of visibility because its CEO is former Microsoft and Juniper Networks executive Bob Muglia. The Datawarehouse-as-a-Service became generally available in June.
Splice Machine
San Francisco
Top executive: CEO Monte Zweben
Splice Machine developed a full-featured, transactional SQL database on Hadoop that can run operational applications and real-time analytics using Hadoop data. After months of development and beta testing, the company began shipping Release 1.0 of its software in November 2014.
Since then Splice Machine has been expanding its roster of strategic alliances, including connecting with MicroStrategy's analytics platform, supporting Talend's data integration software, and working with RedPoint Global's data management and cross-channel marketing systems.
Tamr
Cambridge, Mass.
Top executive: CEO Andy Palmer
You have to love a company whose stated goal is battling the evils of "schema proliferation." Tamr develops enterprise data unification software that businesses use to integrate diverse, siloed data for business analytics tasks and downstream applications.
Tamr is the latest brainchild of database luminary Michael Stonebraker, who started the company in 2013 with fellow database industry veteran Andy Palmer. (Palmer serves as CEO while Stonebraker is chief technology officer.) The two previously started Vertica systems, now owned by Hewlett-Packard.
VoltDB
Bedford, Mass.
Top executive: President and CEO Bruce Reading
VoltDB develops an in-memory, scale-out relational database that combines high-velocity data ingestion with real-time analytics and decision-making tools to help businesses develop a new generation of big data applications.
In March, VoltDB launched the VoltDB Certified Partner Program to recruit partners to install and support the startup's database software. In July, VoltDB scored $9.8 million in additional financing.