5 Big Data Startups to Watch in 2012

Big data, without question, is a 2011 buzz word finalist. But like all metaphors, it communicates a universal understanding that data dominates our lives and will increasingly do so in the years ahead. How can you deny that a company's success will depend in great part on how they view data and its value?

The belief is not lost on venture capitalists who have invested $350 million in Hadoop and NoSQL startups since 2008.

To commemorate this mega trend, we've picked five big data startups and one honorable mention that we believe are ones to watch in 2012. Here they are:

Cloudera took the spotlight once again this year. By year's end, the company had secured an additional $40 million in financing. In total, the company has raised $76 million. Its Hadoop World event had record attendance. And the company is playing a leading role in the emerging Hadop ecosystem. ...

MapR. They don't have to charge for training. The business model is in selling their stack to work with Hadoop. Training is not what they do. My bet: MapR may be best positioned out of all the newcomers in the Hadoop space to make a real run against the incumbents. ...

10gen is cleaning up in the NoSQL market. The company is the sponsor for the open source NoSQL database MongoDB and appears ready to move into broader markets now that the big data meme is spreading into the mainstream. ...

Hortonworks In just a matter of months Hortonworks established itself as a pivotal player among vendors in the Hadoop space. It's a company that did not come out of a garage. It came out of Yahoo! with 22 engineers and funding from Benchmark Capital. ...

Splunk goes into the new year looking at the possibility of an IPO with a value of $1 billion. Splunk analyzes machine data. That means analyzing server and log files. It's a proprietary database that sucks in the data very fast. But setting it apart is its simplicity. It's easy to use. The UI is similar to Google, making it easy to use without any real training. You can do command-line scripting and search for different combinations of events. It provides the user with the capability to build dashboards and alerts. ...

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