Emerging Vendors 2014: Big Data Vendors (Part 1)

Rising Big Data Stars

Technology for managing and analyzing big data is one of the fastest-growing segments of the IT industry right now. And it's an area where innovative startups seem to have a competitive edge over the major, established IT vendors. What's more, the vendors on this list know the value of a good partnership and either have a serious commitment to the channel or plan to leverage it as they "cross the chasm" and go mainstream with their bleeding-edge technologies.

Take a look at the hottest startups in the big data segment from the Emerging Vendors list for 2014. Altogether there are more than 80 startups in the big data/business intelligence space, so we've split them into two shows with vendors A-M included here and vendors N-Z in a slideshow to follow.

Aerospike

Mountain View, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Joe Gottlieb

Aerospike develops a real-time, flash-optimized NoSQL database for running high-performance applications. The in-memory database meets ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) requirements for reliable transaction processing. Earlier this year the database achieved performance of 1 million transactions per second on a single server with 50 million records.

Alpine Data Labs

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: President and CEO Joe Otto

Founded by former members of EMC's Greenplum team, Alpine Data Labs offers an advanced, Hadoop-based data analytics platform that makes it possible for people without coding skills or deep analytical expertise to reap insights from large data sets using a drag-and-drop approach to creating analytical queries.

Alteryx

Irvine, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Dean Stoecker

Alteryx's software blends structured and unstructured data from a range of sources into one database and conducts predictive, spatial and statistical analysis tasks. Alteryx 9.0, released in April, can tap into social media data feeds from DataSift, and sales and marketing data from Google Analytics and Marketo.

Appuri

Redmond, Wash.

Top Executive: CEO Damon Danieli

Appuri operates a cloud-based customer data system that captures customers' touchpoint data from internal and external sources and creates a petabyte-scale data warehouse within a dedicated, virtual private cloud.

Ayasdi

Menlo Park, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Gurjeet Singh

Ayasdi's Insight Discovery Platform, which utilizes "topological data analysis" technology combined with machine learning techniques, provides insights derived from data that help organizations solve complex problems without writing code or queries.

BIME Analytics

Montpellier, France

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Rachel Delacour

BIME offers Business Intelligence-as-a-Service that analyzes data from any source and turns it into actionable information.

Chartio

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Dave Fowler

Chartio develops cloud-based data visualization software that businesses use to combine data sets and create charts and dashboards for analysis -- all without the need to develop an on-premise data warehouse. In January the company raised $2.2 million in financing, in addition to the $4.4 million it raised in 2011.

Circonus

Fulton, Md.

Top Executive: CEO Theo Schlossnagle

Circonus develops a real-time telemetry collection platform, providing businesses with the ability to collect data from any system and apply monitoring, analytics, visualization and alerting tools against that data.

Cirro

Aliso Viejo, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Mark Theissen

Cirro develops a next-generation data federation platform that makes it possible for non-technical users to query and explore structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and perform complex analytical tasks. The company's products include the Cirro Data Hub, Cirro Analyst for Excel and Cirro Multi Store.

Citus Data

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Umur Cubukcu

Citus Data developed CitusDB, a distributed analytics database that can run SQL queries and, according to the company, process petabytes of data in seconds. CitusDB is based on Google Dremel, a real-time analytics database developed by the giant search company. Citus Data released CitusDB 3.0 in February.

ClearStory Data

Palo Alto, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Sharmila Mulligan

ClearStory launched its big data analysis and exploration platform and applications late last year. The company's Data Intelligence software is designed to make it easier to access internal and external data sources, including corporate databases, Hadoop and the Internet, and use that data to uncover trends and patterns.

Cloudera

Palo Alto, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Tom Reilly

Cloudera markets Cloudera Enterprise, the vendor's distribution of the Hadoop platform, coupled with system management (Cloudera Manager) and data management (Cloudera Navigator) tools. On March 31 Cloudera closed on a whopping $900 million financing round, followed a few days later with the general release of Cloudera Enterprise 5.

Concurrent

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Gary Nakamura

Concurrent offers application middleware technology that businesses use to develop, deploy, run and manage big data applications. The company's products include the Cascading application development framework and Driven application performance management software.

Connectivity

Burbank, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Matt Booth

Connectivity develops Software-as-a-Service customer intelligence applications designed to help small businesses monitor and analyze customer interactions online – everything from customer reviews to social media comments. And it aggregates all that information into one dashboard that small businesses use to monitor what's being said about them.

Continuuity

Palo Alto, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Jonathan Gray

One problem with Hadoop is the shortage of skilled developers capable of building applications that leverage its capabilities. Continuuity offers the Continuuity Reactor development engine Java that programmers use to build and deploy cloud-based, big data applications and the Continuuity Loom cluster management software.

Continuum Analytics

Austin, Texas

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Travis Oliphant

Continuum Analytics develops data analytics software based on the Python programming language. In February the company released Anaconda 1.9, the latest version of its collection of libraries for big data management analysis and cross-platform visualization for business intelligence, scientific, engineering and machine learning tasks.

Couchbase

Mountain View, Calif.

Top Executive: President and CEO Bob Wiederhold

A player in the "alternative database" competition, Couchbase develops and supports Couchbase Server -- a commercial version of Apache CouchDB, the open-source, document-oriented NoSQL database. Backers pitch CouchDB as superior to traditional relational databases for managing unstructured data and cloud computing.

DataBricks

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Ion Stoica

Big data managed services provider Databricks Cloud has built a platform to help users "get started with big data in seconds." The platform is 100 percent open source, based on Apache Spark, the analytics cluster computing technology Databricks Cloud founders helped create. The product launched June 30.

DataGravity

Nashua, N.H.

Top Executive: CEO Paula Long

DataGravity remains in development mode and is expected to launch its first product this year. The company says it's developing a technology that will transform stored data into easily digestible information without the need for complex software packages. DavaGravity took the wraps off an early access channel program in February.

DataHero

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Chris Neumann

Under the motto of "Analytics Simplified," this company develops software that analyzes data and automatically creates visualizations -- charts and graphs -- from the information without the need for complex coding.

Datameer

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Stefan Groschupf

Founded 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. Datameer secured $19 million in Series D financing in December and earlier this year launched Datameer 4.0.

DataRPM

Fairfax, Va.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Sundeep Sanghavi

DataRPM develops "cognitive data discovery" technology that lets users analyze and visualize data residing in corporate databases, Hadoop or other sources using a natural language query and search interface. The company's software is available through the cloud or for on-premise.

DataSift

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Rob Bailey

DataSift develops a social data platform for monitoring social media such as Twitter, aggregating and filtering data from public social conversations, and extracting insights from that data. In December DataSift raised $42 million in Series C financing.

DataStax

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Billy Bosworth

DataStax developed a massively scalable data platform based on Apache Cassandra, the open-source distributed database for storing and managing huge amounts of data across multiple data centers and the cloud. The DataStax system also includes Apache Hadoop for analytics and Apache Solr for search.

DoMo

American Fork, Utah

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Josh James

Domo offers a cloud-based executive management platform the company said gives users access to information scattered across myriad sources through a single dashboard. The company was founded by James, previously the co-founder and longtime CEO of Omniture. In February the company raised $125 million in Series C financing.

Emotient

San Diego, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Ken Denman

Emotient develops emotion detection and sentiment analysis software that uses facial recognition technology to detect emotions such as joy, surprise, anger, contempt and more. Business customers use the technology to build systems for customer engagement, research and analysis, and other applications. In April the company raised $6 million in Series B financing.

Fluxx

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Jason Ricci

Fluxx develops a collaborative work platform that combines core CRM capabilities, data aggregation technology and grant management functionality into one system with a unified, real-time dashboard interface.

FoundationDB

Tysons Corner, Va.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO David Rosenthal

Founded in 2009 by Rosenthal, CTO David Scherer and COO Nick Lavezzo, FoundationDB has developed a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database that's capable of processing ACID transactions. The company is competing with mainstream relational database providers like Oracle and Microsoft.

Gainsight

Mountain View, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Nick Mehta

Gainsight develops predictive analytics software that's integrated with Salesforce.com's CRM applications and helps users scrutinize customer data for customer retention tasks and identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

GenieDB

San Juan Capistrano, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Cary Breese

GenieD provides the MySQL database as a cloud service, making it possible to distribute applications running on the database across large geographic distances. In March the company began offering its MySQL-as-a-Service through Amazon Web Services' AWS Marketplace.

Glassbeam

Santa Clara, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Puneet Pandit

Glassbeam develops Software-as-a-Service applications for product analytics based on machine log data, putting it in a key position in business intelligence in the nascent-but-growing "Internet of Things" market.

Hortonworks

Palo Alto, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Rob Bearden

Hortonworks is one of the most visible big data startups, offering the Hortonworks Data Platform built around its own Hadoop distribution and related components. Earlier this month Hewlett-Packard invested $50 million in Hortonworks and said it would integrate the emerging vendor's software with the HP HAVEn big data platform.

JethroData

Natanya, Israel

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Eli Singer

JethroData develops an index-based SQL engine for Hadoop the company says combines the scalability of HDFS (the Hadoop file system) with the power of a fully indexed columnar analytical database.

Librato

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Fred van den Bosch

Librato develops a Software-as-a-Service platform for real-time operational monitoring, time series data analysis and alerts based on metrics that are important to a business.

MapR Technologies

San Jose, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO John Schroeder

MapR Technologies competes with Cloudera, Hortonworks and other vendors in the Hadoop arena, building on its distribution of Hadoop and other open-source Apache software to create a big data platform for both operational and analytical purposes. In June the company closed on $110 million in financing from Google Capital and other investors.

MemSQL

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Eric Frenkiel

MemSQL develops a distributed, in-memory database that can handle real-time and historical data analytics. Earlier this year MemSQL unveiled version 3.0 of its software with an integrated, tiered storage architecture that allows the platform to scale to hundreds of terabytes.

Metric Insights

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: Founder and CEO Marius Moscovici

Metric Insights pitches its "push intelligence" technology as an antidote to business intelligence reports and dashboards that make users hunt for information. The Metrics Insight software delivers personalized business intelligence, key performance indicators and alerts.

Mixpanel

San Francisco, Calif.

Top Executive: Suhail Doshi

Mixpanel says it has developed the most advanced analytics platform for mobile computing and the Web.

Mortar Data

New York

Top Executive: CEO K Young

Mortar Data provides a cloud-based Hadoop service, essentially a Platform-as-a-Service version of Apache Hadoop, that helps developers and data scientists collaborate on building applications around giant data sets without all the headaches. At the core of the offering is the company's open-source development framework.