10 Data Analytics Companies To Watch In 2019
The Ones To Watch
Big data and business analytics continue to be one of the most dynamic and fastest growing segments of the IT industry, crowded with both established companies and startups developing technology to help meet big data business analytics challenges.
The market for big data and business analytics solutions is expected to finish out 2018 with total worldwide revenue of $166 billion, up 11.7 percent from 2017 revenue, according to IDC. The market researcher is predicting that worldwide spending for big data and business analytics technology will reach $260 billion in 2022, an 11.9 percent compound annual growth rate over the 2017-2022 period.
Which business analytics vendors will be leading the way in 2019? Here are 10 companies we suggest keeping an eye on in the new year.
AtScale
Top Executive: Chris Lynch, CEO
AtScale aims to remake the traditional data warehouse industry with its data warehouse virtualization platform, based on its Universal Semantic Layer technology, that integrates multiple on-premise and cloud data sources into a single virtual data warehouse. By creating a virtualization layer for online analytical processing tasks, AtScale pitches itself as an alternative to centralized, on-premise data warehouses.
The San Mateo, Calif-based company doubled its sales in 2018, hired former Vertica Systems CEO Chris Lynch as its new CEO (co-founder Dave Mariani moved to the CTO post), and recently raised $50 million in Series D funding to fuel its growth. So the company appears poised to move to the next level of growth in 2019.
The company is also expected to hire its first channel chief early in 2019 and has plans to launch a channel program in the new year.
Cloudera
Top Executive: Tom Reilly, CEO
In October rival big data platform companies Cloudera and Hortonworks announced a plan to merge in a deal that will create a new big data industry behemoth under the Cloudera name. The company will boast a broad portfolio of data management and related software, more than 2,500 customers, $720 million in annual sales and a combined equity value of $5.2 billion.
The merger won't be easy, however. The companies have a number of overlapping products and technologies and rationalizing the combined company's product lines alone will be a challenge. And both Cloudera and Hortonworks had been operating in the red, something Cloudera, based in Palo Alto, Calif., hopes to change by realizing more than $125 million in annualized savings through sales and R&D optimization.
If successful, the new Cloudera will clearly be a leading vendor in the big data industry. Observers will be watching every move in 2018 to see if the company can pull it off.
Exasol
Top Executive: Aaron Auld, CEO
Exasol has developed an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system that the company likes to call "the future of analytics."
Based in Nuremberg, Germany, Exasol has been gaining attention in the role its database plays in analytical data infrastructure. With business analytics becoming more of a critical function for businesses, the performance and security of the underlying data management infrastructure is becoming increasingly important – demands that Exasol says it can meet.
Exasol works with a broad range of partners including solution providers, systems integrators, implementation service providers, business consultants, and technology partners and OEMs.
Fivetran
Top Executive: George Fraser, CEO and Co-Founder
Startup Fivetran says it is redefining data pipelines, developing software that automates the process of centralizing all of a company's business data in a cloud-based data warehouse for business analytics tasks.
As more businesses and organizations move their data warehouses to cloud systems like Snowflake Computing and Amazon Web Services, they need simpler ways to collect business data from multiple sources and feed it to those cloud systems. Fivetran says its technology replaces antiquated ETL (extract, transform and load) models to support cloud data warehouses.
The Oakland-based company raised $15 million in Series A funding in early December after experiencing a three-fold increase in revenue in the previous 12 months and a doubling of customers.
Looker Data Sciences
Top Executive: Frank Bien, CEO
The business intelligence/business analytics software market is crowded with both startups and established companies. Looker, developer of a data analytics platform and business intelligence applications, is one company that's looking to break out of the pack in 2019.
Looker, whose sales grew 70 percent between Oct. 31, 2017 and Oct. 31, 2018, certainly has the resources to continue its rapid growth. In Early December the company raised $103 million in Series E financing – funds the Santa Cruz, Calif.-based company intends to accelerate its product development efforts and support its expanding operations.
MapR Technologies
Top Executive: John Schroeder, CEO
MapR Technologies markets a big data platform that competes head-to-head with software from Cloudera and Hortonworks. And as those two rivals work to merge and rationalize their overlapping product lines, it will be interesting to watch MapR in 2019 as it seeks to take advantage of any uncertainty created by the merger.
In November MapR unveiled the "Clarity Program" to offer free data assessments and other incentives in an effort to woo worried Cloudera and Hortonworks customers to its software. The Santa Clara, Calif., company also unveiled a new release of its MapR Data Platform with a number of new capabilities and features covering AI, cloud, container and Internet of Things technologies.
Octopai
Top Executive: Amnon Drori, CEO and Co-Founder
Metadata today is scattered across multiple, disparate systems, making it difficult for business analytics groups to find the data they are looking for, slowing down business analysis tasks and projects. The workaround to the problem often means using multiple tools that require special development and customization.
Octopai, founded in 2015, developed an automated, centralized, cross-platform metadata management and data lineage search engine that business intelligence organizations use to quickly discover and govern shared metadata.
Octopai, based in Rosh Ha'ayin, Israel, began appearing on people's radar screens in 2018. Part of that was thanks to the company being named one of 10 cloud-based startups to participate in Microsoft's ScaleUp 2018 program, a four-month program that provides startups with tools, resources, connections, knowledge and expertise to accelerate their growth.
We'll see in 2019 is Octopai can do just that.
Periscope Data
Top Executive: Harry Glaser, CEO and Co-Founder
Periscope Data is another company that could be poised to break out of the business analytics pack in 2019. The San Francisco-based company develops an advanced, unified data system that data teams use to ingest, store, analyze, visualize and report on data and deliver deeper insights to their organizations.
In November the company launched Data Engine by Periscope Data, the first phase of its next-generation analytics warehouse integration technology. With the ability to bypass the most challenging steps in data ETL (extract, transform and load) processes, the Data Engine software will help data teams achieve faster query performance and data ingestion at scale for any kind of workload regardless of concurrency, data volume or query complexity, according to the company.
Snowflake Computing
Top Executive: Bob Muglia, CEO
Businesses and organizations have been steadily adopting the concept of moving their data warehouse operations to the cloud in recent years. Cloud-based data warehousing is forecast to be a $20 billion market in 2020, up from $14 billion in 2017.
While industry behemoths like Amazon Web Services and Oracle are competing in this market, San Mateo, Calif,-based Snowflake Computing, a provider of cloud-native data warehousing services, has emerged as the cloud data warehouse mindshare leader.
Snowflake, founded in 2012, went live with its cloud data warehouse services in 2015 and it's been on an upward trajectory ever since. While the privately held company doesn't disclose sales, the roster of its 1,000-plus customers includes Netflix, Office Depot, Ebates and Yamaha.
Some of the aura around Snowflake is due to the astounding amount of venture capital the company has raised – including $263 million in January and $450 million in October (for a total of $923 million since its founding) – and a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion.
The move to cloud-based data warehouse systems will undoubtedly continue – even accelerate – in 2019. As more companies jump into this space, the question will be whether Snowflake can maintain its momentum.
Yellowbrick Data
Top Executive: Neil Carson, CEO and Co-Founder
Yellowbrick Data just emerged from stealth in August, debuting its all-flash analytics and data warehouse appliance that the company says can handle petabytes of data and is magnitudes smaller and faster than current-generation data warehouse systems.
The startup’s system includes an analytic database designed for flash memory and integrated CPU, storage and networking with data moving directly from flash memory to the CPU.
While cloud data warehouse systems have been getting a lot of attention, Yellowbrick Data, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is betting that there is demand for on-premise data warehouse systems. It will be interesting to see if that bet is right.