Emerging Vendors 2013: Big Data/Business Intelligence Vendors

Big Data Big Shots

Technology for managing and analyzing big data is one of 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 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. Let's take a look at the hottest startups in the big data/business intelligence segment from the Emerging Vendors list for 2013.

Alpine Data Labs

San Mateo, Calif.
Top Executive: Joe Otto, President & CEO

Founded by former members of EMC's Greenplum team, Alpine Data Labs specializes in predictive analytics. Alpine Data Labs' analytics platform works on both Hadoop-based and traditional data sources and, according to the company, is a breeze to navigate and deploy.

Attivio

Newton, Mass.
Top Executive: Ali Riaz, CEO

Attivio's forte is bundling enterprise search, business intelligence and big data to give organizations a more clear-cut view of their business and their data. Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine sits between data sources and analytical apps to provide data search and integration capabilities.

Cloudera

Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Tom Reilly, CEO

Cloudera offers a big data platform based on its distribution of Apache Hadoop (Cloudera Enterprise), along with tools for implementing (Cloudera Quickstart) and managing (Cloudera Manager) Hadoop. Cloudera Navigator helps administrators, data managers and analysts to secure, govern and explore data within Cloudera Enterprise.

Datameer

San Mateo, Calif.
Top Executive: Stefan Groschupf, CEO

Datameer's claim to fame is an integrated solution for performing big data management, integration and self-service analytics. The company's analytics solution is a single application that requires no ETL or static schemas and comes preloaded with 200-plus functions.

Fluxx

San Francisco
Top Executive: Jason Ricci, Founder & CEO

Fluxx's business management platform aggregates all company data together into a single, unified interface in real time, according to the company. The cloud-based service lets users compile applications and specific data into a dashboard that showcases only the data they need. Fluxx can be run as a standalone platform or in conjunction with third-party businesses and social applications including Salesforce, Zendesk and LinkedIn.

FoundationDB

Vienna, Va.
Top Executives: David Rosenthal (pictured left), Nick Lavezzo (pictured right), and Dave Scherer, Co-Founders

FoundationDB has been developing a NoSQL (for not only SQL) database designed for high-performance, ACID transaction processing. Earlier this year the company exited stealth mode and began shipping its new technology that poses a direct challenge to established relational database vendors like Oracle and Microsoft. The company acquired database virtualization technology developer Akiban in July.

Hadapt

Cambridge, Mass.
Top Executive: Justin Borgman, Co-Founder & CEO

Hadapt touts its Hadapt Adaptive Analytic Platform as merging the best of Hadoop and relational database management software into a single big data platform. The result, the company says, is a high-performance analytics system capable of working with structured and unstructured data.

Hortonworks

Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Rob Bearden, CEO

Hortonworks is one of the more visible big data startups, offering the Hortonworks Data Platform built around its own Hadoop distribution and related components. The company also offers support and training services and a downloadable "sandbox" version of Hadoop for evaluation.

HStreaming

Chicago
Top Executive: Jana Uhlig, CEO

HStreaming's Apache Hadoop-based platform provides analytics capabilities for unstructured sources of data, such as video content and embedded sensors. It's compatible with all major Hadoop distributions, with common use cases including video analytics, particularly in the military, along with network analytics and fraud detection.

Karmasphere

Cupertino, Calif.
Top Executive: Gail Ennis, CEO

Karmasphere has three main offerings: Karmasphere Analyst, which gives information analysts access to structured and unstructured data in Hadoop; Karmasphere Studio, which provides tools for developing custom algorithms for Hadoop; and Karmasphere Analytics Engine, the foundation for its software.

LucidWorks

Redwood City, Calif.
Top Executive: Paul Doscher, President & CEO

LucidWorks, formerly Lucid Imagination, applies the concept of search engines to big data, offering a development platform that accelerates and simplifies the creation of enterprise-grade search applications. In addition to building search apps more quickly, LucidWorks Search can help streamline search setup and optimization for more reliable results.

MapR Technologies

San Jose, Calif.
Top Executive: John Schroeder, Co-Founder & CEO

MapR offers multiple editions of its distribution of the Hadoop big data platform combined with training, support and other professional services. Also offered are software and services for vertical industries such as healthcare, manufacturing and retail.

Mixpanel

San Francisco
Top Executive: Suhail Doshi, CEO

Mixpanel offers Web and mobile analytics software. Its data visualization product, Flow, gives website operators data about their website traffic. Earlier this year, the company launched Mixpanel Trends, which aggregates data it collects from all its customers.

Mortar Data

New York
Top Executive: K Young, CEO

Mortar Data provides a cloud-based Hadoop service, essentially a platform-as-a-service version of Apache Hadoop, which 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.

Renovo

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Top Executive: Maureen Okerstrom, President



Renovo develops browser-based financial reporting software that streamlines the design, compilation and distribution of financial information. Applications include Renovofyi, a financial report writer; Cloudfyi, a Web-based SaaS deployment; Currencyfyi, a currency translation application; and Connectfyi, a general ledger integration tool.

Revolution Analytics

Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Dave Rich, CEO

Revolution Analytics offers software and services that support users of R, the open-source programming language for developing statistical and data analysis applications. The company offers both enterprise and free community versions of its Revolution R software, the former of which can perform advanced analytics on terabyte-class data sets.

RJMetrics

Philadelphia
Top Executive: Robert Moore, Founder & CEO

RJMetrics develops cloud-based business intelligence software used by e-commerce companies to collect and analyze online transaction data.

ScaleArc

Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: Varun Singh, Founder & CEO

ScaleArc develops the ScaleArc iDB database infrastructure software, which improves the performance of SQL databases that are choking on big data. The product sits between databases and applications, providing database administrators with visibility into database traffic and improving database scalability and availability through its dynamic clustering, load-balancing and sharding capabilities.

Sensitel

Santa Clara, Calif.
Top Executive: M.S. "Ray" Sikka, CEO

Sensitel develops software that collects data from embedded sensors, the kind found in everything from smartphones to GPS devices, and analyzes it to help companies garner insights into their business. Logistics service providers, for instance, use Sensitel's TrackAware solution to track over 100,000 shipments and ensure on-time delivery. Retail chains leverage Sensitel's StaffCaster tool to identify which parts of their stores are most populated by shoppers and then direct their staff accordingly.

Simularity

Richmond, Calif.
Top Executive: Liz Derr, Founder & CEO

Simularity develops a business analytics platform that performs both streaming and historical analysis of big data. The software helps businesses find commonalities among massive unstructured data sets that can make them more competitive. The ability to build more targeted, customized advertisements is one of big data's biggest value propositions.

Splice Machine

San Francisco
Top Executive: Monte Zweben, Co-Founder & CEO

While NoSQL databases have been getting a lot of attention, Splice Machine is bucking that trend with a SQL-compliant database designed for big data applications. The company says its Splice SQL Engine, built on the Hadoop stack, offers the same scalability benefits as NoSQL without having to rewrite SQL-based applications and business analytics tools.

Sqrrl

Cambridge, Mass.
Top Executive: Mark Terenzoni, CEO

Sqrrl makes Sqrrl Enterprise, a big data platform for building real-time apps that can analyze structured, semi-structured or unstructured data. According to Sqrrl, the platform can scale elastically to tens of petabytes of data and is meant to help businesses uncover "hidden value" in their data through interactive queries.

SumAll

New York
Top Executive: Dane Atkinson, CEO

Data analytics startup SumAll said its software brings together disparate data from multiple sources and makes it available on one chart. SumAll users can integrate information from such sources as Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, eBay, PayPal, Shopify, Big Commerce, Magento and Instagram into one intuitive, interactive chart.

Tidemark Systems

Redwood City, Calif.
Top Executive: Christian Gheorghe, Founder & CEO

Tidemark Systems develops what it calls the first enterprise performance management platform and applications built for cloud computing. Big data comes into the picture because the Tidemark EPM application system is built on Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop, allowing it to extract value from massive volumes of complex data. Tidemark is targeting applications in manufacturing, consumer products, retail and high-tech companies.

VersaReports

Atlanta
Top Executive: Andy Feibus, President

Report servers are portals for back-end reporting engines that businesses use to schedule and manage the dissemination of reports to managers and employees. VersaReports' ReportServer works with any report designer, including Crystal Reports, DevExpress XtraRepors and Telerik Reporting.

Versium

Redmond, Wash.
Top Executive: Chris Matty, CEO

Versium has developed what it calls a "LifeData" platform that collects publicly available online and offline data about consumers and combines it with information a business may already have, such as a customer's spending history, to create a detailed profile of that customer. The system can collect and cross-analyze demographic, psycho-graphic and social-graphic information, everything from purchase interests to education levels to financial and credit ratings.

Visier

San Francisco
Top Executive: John Schwarz, Co-Founder & CEO

Visier develops workforce analytics and planning applications, software the company said business and human resource managers use to better gauge their workforce needs. Visier's cloud-based software, with its predictive capabilities, helps organizations attract and retain employees, improve productivity and reduce workforce-related costs.

WibiData

San Francisco
Top Executive: Christophe Bisciglia (pictured) and Aaron Kimball, Co-Founders

WibiData leverages Apache Hadoop, Hbase and other technologies to manage and analyze huge volumes of data about user behavior, including profile data and log-oriented transactional data. The idea is that all data pertaining to a user, customer, etc., is kept all in one place.

Zettaset

Mountain View, Calif.
Top Executive, Jim Vogt: CEO

Zettaset's Orchestrator software, which supports Hadoop distributions from multiple vendors, automates and simplifies Hadoop deployments. The software also adds "enterprise-class" security and compliance management to those deployments.