2014 Big Data 100: Data Management
Data Management Vendors
Businesses continue to struggle with exploding volumes of data, not just manage it to keep IT systems from being overwhelmed, but to find ways of deriving value from all that data and somehow use it for competitive advantage.
With that in mind the CRN editorial team has created the second annual Big Data 100 list, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help business work with big data. Here are 25 data management technology companies offering everything from next-generation database systems to advanced data integration technology to tools for developing applications that take advantage of big data.
Actian
Top Executive: President, CEO Steve Shine
Under the motto of "Accelerating big data 2.0," Actian offers a number of data analytics and data management systems -- many of them acquired including Relational Technology, Ingres, Versant, Pervasive and ParAccel. The company is based in Redwood City, Calif.
This month Actian struck a partnership with cloud application software vendor NetSuite through which organizations can use Actian's connectivity software to link data from NetSuite ERP applications with data from other sources.
Actifio
Top Executive: CEO Ash Ashutosh
Fast-growing Actifio has developed a copy data management platform that eliminates the problem of "data sprawl" across a company by creating a single copy of an organization's production data and making it virtually available for backup, disaster recovery, software development and testing, business analytics and archiving purposes.
In March Actifio, founded in 2009, received $100 million in financing, giving the Waltham, Mass.-based company a valuation of about $1 billion. About 85 percent of the company's sales are through channel partners.
Aerospike
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.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, founded in 2009, said earlier this month that its database achieved performance of 1 million transactions per second on a single server with 50 million records, based on the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark.
Appuri
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.
Founded in 2012, Appuri is based in Redmond, Wash.
Attunity
Top Executive: CEO Alon Shimon
Attunity is in the information availability business, providing tools for data replication, change data capture, data connectivity, enterprise file replication, managed file transfer and cloud data delivery.
In April Attunity, founded in 1998 and based in Burlington, Mass., debuted its Maestro big data management platform that automates processes for composing, conducting and monitoring the flow of information throughout a global company for both operational and analytical systems.
Citus Data
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 with a number of new capabilities including dynamic repartitioning of tables to handle joins between any number of tables, independent of their size and partitioning method. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2010.
Couchbase
Top Executive: President, CEO Bob Wiederhold
Another entry 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.
Couchbase, founded in 2011 and based in Mountain View, Calif., released Couchbase Server 2.5 in February with "rack awareness" for improved availability and reliability, and advanced data encryption added to the system's cross-data center replication.
DataRPM
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Sundeep Sanghavi
DataRPM developed "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.
Based in Fairfax, Va., and founded in 2012, DataRPM raised $5.1 million in its first round of funding led by InterWest partners.
DataStax
Top Executive: CEO Billy Bosworth
Santa Clara, Calif.-based 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. The company was founded in 2010.
In February DataStax launched its partner network program to recruit big data solution providers, consultants, technology service providers, professional services companies, training firms and application developers to work with the company.
Enterprise DB
Top Executive: President, CEO Ed Boyajian
EnterpriseDB provides software and services around the popular PostgreSQL open-source relational database. The company offers the Postgres Plus Advanced Server that's compatible with the Oracle Database, database management and replication tools, and other products.
Founded in 2004 and based in Bedford, Mass., EnterpriseDB reported that its revenue grew 200 percent in 2013. Earlier this month the company unveiled support for the OpenStack platform.
InfiniDB
Top Executive: CEO Bob Wilkinson
InfiniDB focuses on big data analytics with its fourth-generation database that's based on columnar technology and massive parallel processing to enable near real-time analytics and huge scalability.
In February the Frisco, Texas-based company launched InfiniDB 4.5 with new Hadoop capabilities, expanded ETL functionality and the new InfiniDB Enterprise Manager console. Wilkinson, who joined the company in 2012 as engineering vice president and became COO last year, was named CEO in April.
Informatica
Top Executive: CEO Sohaib Abbasi
Informatica, launched in 1993, is perhaps the original data integration technology company with its data ETL (extract, transform and load) tools, data quality management software and master data management products.
Informatica's products have traditionally targeted data warehouse developers. Last week the Redwood City, Calif.-based company unveiled its Intelligent Data Platform software designed to help business users identify and access the data they need to run operational applications and business analytics tools.
JethroData
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Eli Singer
JethroData develops an index-based SQL engine for Hadoop that it says combines the scalability of HDFS (the Hadoop file system) with the power of a fully indexed columnar analytical database.
The company was found in 2012 and is based in Natanya, Israel.
MarkLogic
Top Executive: President, CEO Gary Bloom
MarkLogic was founded in 2003 "before NoSQL was cool," the company says. The company's Enterprise NoSQL database platform can be used in conjunction with popular business analytics tools such as IBM's Cognos and Tableau.
Last month the San Carlos, Calif.-based company said that MarkLogic 8, the next release of its software, would support server-side JavaScript and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), making it easier for developers to build and deploy data-intensive, real-time applications on its database.
MemSQL
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Eric Frenkiel
MemSQL calls itself "the leader in real-time and historical big data analytics based on a distributed in-memory database." In January the company, founded in 2011, raised $35 million in Series B Funding.
In February San Francisco-based MemSQL unveiled version 3.0 of its in-memory database with combined in-memory row store and highly compressed column store. That integrated architecture, according to the company, allows the database to tap into both real-time and historical data for transaction processing and deep analysis.
MongoDB
Top Executive: CEO Max Schireson
MongoDB develops the open-source NoSQL database of the same name (which comes from "humongous"). Forgoing the table-based structure of traditional relational databases, MongoDB is a cross-platform, document-oriented database system.
The New York-based company was founded in 2007. It raised $150 million in Series F financing in October 2013, including funding from EMC, Red Hat and Salesforce.com.
Neo Technology
Top Executive: CEO Emil Eifrem
Neo Technology is the San Mateo, Calif., company behind the Neo4j NoSQL graph database. That system uses graph structures to represent and store data, a design the company said is massively scalable and more efficient for managing and querying highly connected data.
In March Neo Technology, founded in 2007, said retailer Wal-Mart was using the Neo4j database to collect and analyze data about shopper behavior, and online auction site eBay had adopted the database to help manage its same-day delivery service.
Paxata
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Prakash Nanduri
Paxata is in the business of "adaptive data preparation," offering technology that simplifies the often-tedious work of transforming raw data into data that can be analyzed with business analytics tools such as QlikTech and Tableau (both Paxata partners). IntelliFusion, a proprietary semantic fusion and machine learning engine, is at the core of the company's cloud-based products.
In March In-Q-Tel, the CIA's strategic investment firm, invested an undisclosed amount in Paxata, The company was founded in 2012 and is based in Redwood City, Calif.
Recommind
Top Executive: CEO Bob Tennant
Recommind, founded in 2000, develops an enterprise search and data categorization platform that organizes, manages and distributes huge volumes of data from multiple sources. Law firms and the legal community are a key market for the company's technology.
In February San Francisco-based Recommind debuted Axcelerate 5, a major release of the company's flagship eDiscovery and analysis platform. The software provides a redesigned interface, new analytics and visualization tools, and new, more flexible workflows.
Revelytix
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Michael Lang
Revelytix develops Loom, a Hadoop-based system that's capable of integrating data from disparate data sources without having to create a central data warehouse or data mart. The company was founded in 2005.
In April Cockeysville, Md.-based Revelytix unveiled a strategic technology partnership with big data security technology developer Zettaset under which the two companies will offer their complementary software for businesses looking to simplify their Hadoop management chores.
ScaleARC
Top Executive: President, CEO Justin Barney
ScaleArc develops database infrastructure software the company says simplifies the way database systems are deployed and managed. The toolset provides IT managers with a view of database traffic and improves database scalability and availability through dynamic clustering, load balancing and sharding (horizontal database partitioning) capabilities.
ScaleArc, founded in 2009 and based in Santa Clara, Calif., recently began offering its software through the Marketplace for Rackspace Hosting, bringing database traffic management to cloud computing.
Splice Machine
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Monte Zweben
Founded in 2012, Splice Machine has been developing a full-featured, transactional SQL database on Hadoop that can run operational applications and real-time analytics using Hadoop data. The technology, which Splice Machine just began offering as a public beta, is designed to get around Hadoop's limitation of operating in batch mode.
San Francisco-based Splice Machine raised $15 million in Series B financing in February, bringing its total financing to $19 million.
Talend
Top Executive: CEO Mike Tuchen
Talend has assembled a lineup of open-source data management software including tools for data integration, data quality management, master data management, business process management and an enterprise service bus.
In December Los Altos, Calif.-based Talend raised $40 million in financing, bringing its total funding to more than $101 million. The company was founded in 2005.
TempoDB
Top Executive: Co-Founder, CEO Andrew Cronk
TempoDB offers a database service specifically designed for time-series data, a problem that many databases have trouble handling. Time series data includes things like thermostat temperatures, heart rates and network latency statistics. The company has customers using its software for energy and smart grid management, server and network monitoring, and monitoring social media.
TempoDB was founded in 2011 and is based in Chicago.
WibiData
Top Executive: Founder, CEO Christophe Bisciglia
Many organizations are adopting Hadoop to capture and manage big data. But what can you do with it? WidiData develops software that helps businesses develop predictive customer-facing applications on the Hadoop platform. That, according to WibiData, will help businesses derive more value from big data.
Bisciglia, founder of Hadoop software developer Cloudera, founded San Francisco-based WibiData in 2010. Last year the company snapped up $18 million in venture financing.