Prev
Analytics/Visualization vendors
Attensity
What: Social and customer analytics for marketing, sentiment, product launches
Why: They say marketing gets the bucks for technology these days, and here's one place they are spending it. Out-of-the-box social solution is a sandbox with power tools for brands to listen, analyze, relate and act on customer conversations on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. With natural language processing and text analytics, companies can burrow into the mounds of unstructured data that is social media.
Where: Palo Alto, CA
www.attensity.com
Clarabridge
What: Sentiment Analysis via natural language processing text analytics
Why: Like an industrial ore digger, Clarabridge churns text and customer experience into a uniform view. Natural language extracts and translates anything from social media (Facebook, Twitter, product review sites) to call center notes, email, chats and surveys. Clarabridge has climbed the ranks as standard working gear at by top brands across multiple industries.
Where: Reston, VA and London
www.clarabridge.com
GoodData
What: Cloud-based mashup reporting analytics
Why: Thousands of customers and positive testimonials speaks volumes about a value proposition. With a single platform that combines operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics and collaboration tools, this solution give even the most tech-illiterate access to quality BI.
Where: San Francisco, CA
www.gooddata.com
LogiXML
What: Web-based data visualization and BI tools tailored for business size and industry
Why: Something old, something new, mostly all useful with modular architecture and boilerplate connectors that keep sources of reports and dashboards in one funnel with side benefits their customers have told us about directly. A diverse set of visualization tools, consistent quarters of double-digit revenue growth.
Where: McLean, VA
www.logixml.com
QlikTech
What: Business discovery and visualization software
Why: You'll win a lot of friends quickly with tools that one analyst calls "instant gratification" of the type that don't come from data models or data warehouses. New enhancements for mobile access, data lineage and metadata automated discovery.
Where: Radnor, PA
www.qlikview.com
Quantivo
What: Ad hoc marketing analytics SaaS on AWS
Why: Because marketing analytics has nowhere to go but up. Proprietary pattern-store technology to locate affinities across data stores, query engine, and elastic cloud architecture. "We exist to make analytics fun again," they say. Was it ever not the case?
Where: Emeryville, CA
www.quantivo.com
Quiterian
What: SaaS predictive analytics layer for BI
Why: Self-service and agile BI need to be in your sales brochure and these days they'd better work. Our source says that is the case here with broadly accessible visual data mining and predictive analysis that's fast, user friendly and comprehensive. (Suggestion: How about a "no cubes" t-shirt logo?)
Where: Miami, FL and Barcelona, Spain
www.quiterian
Tableau
What: Data visualization/search analytics
Why: Tableau built a fan club with easy-to-access dashboards. As more business users get into their data, drag-and-drop reports and charts grow an Excel-like penetration with adherents where visualizations flow into SharePoint or other collaborative platforms.
Where: Seattle, WA
www.tableau.com
Big Data Vendors
Cloudant
What: Managed cloud database
Why: NoSQL that's distributed, replicated, "managed by experts," REST API full-text search and analytics on globally scalable ApacheCouchDB. Besides migrating your marketing analytics database to these MIT guys, they sound like the type you'd trust to feed your dog while you're away.
Where: Boston, MA
www.cloudant.com
Cloudera
What: Data storage and processing services on Apache Hadoop
Why: For big data users that are ready for enterprise-level security, integration and infrastructure and a variety of subscription-based services. Backers have made it rain in this cloud for the last three years.
Where: Palo Alto, CA
www.cloudera.com
DataStax
What: NoSQL Cassandra Hadoop
Why: Okay, we're sensing a theme. DataStax brings an array of open source products to Cassandra, a scalable NoSQL database for real-time big data workloads across multiple nodes. With a workhorse of a download platform (you pay for support and consulting), our source tells us DataStax will become a household name in BI. (Is there such a thing as a household name in BI?)
Where: San Mateo, CA
www.datastax.com
Hadapt
What: Big data analytics
Why: Combining relational database technology with Hadoop into a single system, Hadapt produces cloud-based big data analytics. Data stored in Hadapt can be accessed using existing SQL-based tools and SQL queries can be performed significantly faster than using Hadoop+Hive.
Where: Cambridge, MA
www.hadapt.com
Hortonworks
What: Enterprise big data platform on open source Apache Hadoop
Why: Big in the big data space right off the bat, Hortonworks with engineers and financing from Yahoo!, you could say these folks wrote the book on enterprise use of Hadoop because they did, a lot of it anyway. With a year under their belt, Hortonworks gets high marks from analysts on cluster monitoring and metadata sharing across systems.
Where: Sunnyvale, CA
www.hortonworks.com
MapR
What: Enterprise-scale Apache Hadoop distribution
Why: Claims "no single point of failure" or downtime and full data protection. No shortage of community coding language contributions from MapR, and it's winning commercial converts of late on those SLAs. It's early to name any knock-out winners in enterprise Hadoop, but clearly stated use cases across multiple industries and a mantra of reliability can't hurt their case.
Where: San Jose, CA
www.mapr.com
Skytree
What: Big data machine learning/natural language processing
Why: "Natural language models that you don't have to teach English first," says our trusted source, which eliminates a lot of misinterpretation.
Where: San Jose, CA
www.skytreecorp.com
Splunk
What: IT and machine analytics
Why: Because machine data is churning and we're still figuring out what we need and what to do with it. Splunk's ROI comes from reducing IT downtime, cutting legacy cost, supporting revenue-generating IT, reducing fraud, enforcing SLAs with business and compliance risk insights.
Where: San Francisco, CA
www.splunk.com
Read more, including categories of
- Analytics/Visualization
- BI / Business Intelligence
- Big Data
- Database
- Integration/Governance