10 Big Data/Business Intelligence Emerging Vendors You Need To Know About

Big Data, Big Potential

Startups that develop technology for collecting, managing and analyzing big data are well represented on the CRN 2016 Emerging Vendors list. That's not so surprising given that the market for big data and business analytics applications, tools and services hit nearly $122 billion last year and will grow more than 50 percent to $187 billion in 2019, according to market researcher IDC.

While much of that growth is generated by big, established vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and SAS, startups including Cazena, Confluent and Snowflake Computing are vying for a share of that growth in what's proving to be a very dynamic market. And that means opportunities for solution providers that work with them.

Here's a selection of 10 big data/business intelligence startups from this year's CRN Emerging Vendors roundup.

AtScale

San Mateo, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Dave Mariani

Founded: 2013

AtScale provides a bridge between business users, their favorite business intelligence tools, and the Hadoop-stored data they are working with. AtScale's founders launched the company based on their personal experiences building BI solutions on Hadoop at Yahoo and Klout. AtScale works with customers across financial services, health care, retail, manufacturing and other industries to make BI work on Hadoop.

AtScale Intelligence Platform 4.0, launched in March, offers what the company calls "hybrid query service," technology that can natively query Hadoop from any BI tool in either MDX or SQL -- the two leading syntaxes for querying data in database systems.

Cazena

Waltham, Mass.

Top Executive: Prat Moghe

Founded: 2014

Cazena offers a Big-Data-as-a-Service platform that can be integrated into enterprise IT infrastructures and connected to existing data flows and IT processes. Businesses use the service to assemble cloud-based data lakes and data marts used for provisioning and optimizing big data systems, including those built on Hadoop, Spark and MPP SQL technologies.

Cazena has attracted a lot of attention and financing because CEO Moghe and board members Jit Saxena and Jim Baum helped found Netezza, a pioneering developer of data warehouse appliances that IBM acquired in 2010 for $1.7 billion.

Confluent

Palo Alto, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Jay Kreps

Founded: 2014

Founded by the creators of the open-source Apache Kafka messaging software, Confluent enables organizations to harness business value from streaming data. The Confluent Platform manages stream data and makes it available throughout an organization. It provides businesses in industries such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, financial services and online social networking with a scalable, unified, real-time data pipeline.

In May the startup debuted Confluent Platform 3.0, a major release that introduced Kafka Streams, a Java library for building distributed stream-processing applications. The 3.0 edition also features the Confluent Control Center, the company's first commercial product, for managing a Kafka environment.

Looker

Santa Cruz, Calif.

Top Executive: Frank Bien

Founded: 2012

Looker makes data operational for businesses. Looker is a complete data platform, from data modeling to self-service tools, that provide analytics capabilities and insight to every function of a business and easily integrates into every departmental application to get data directly into the decision-making process.

The company also offers Powered by Looker, a service that allows businesses, ISVs and solution providers to embed the Looker analytics capabilities within any application, website or portal. That gives partners the ability to quickly deploy data analytics tools to their own customers.

Pneuron

New York

Top Executive: CEO Simon Moss

Founded: 2010

Pneuron's technology allows organizations to analyze and leverage the massive amounts of big data that reside within the enterprise. Deployed as a distributed processing network that leverages a microservices-styled architecture, Pneuron provides a distributed data access, extraction and transfer system that enables real-time control of data discovery, retrieval and analysis.

In April the company launched Pneuron 2.0 with an expanded range of options for building, managing and deploying its technology for integrating applications, data, infrastructure and services. It also provides expanded visualization and systems management capabilities.

Qubole

Mountain View, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Ashish Thusoo

Founded: 2011

Qubole is a Big Data-as-a-Service company. Its cloud-based platform processes huge volumes of structured and unstructured data using the three major cloud services to help both large and small enterprises extract value out of their big data while enabling operations teams to be nimble and adaptive to users' needs.

In January Qubole wrapped up $30 million in Series C funding.

Snowflake Computing

San Mateo, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Bob Muglia

Founded: 2012

Snowflake Computing is a data warehouse built for the cloud, allowing customers to safely store, transform and analyze their business data and making it easy to quickly gain insight. From world-class enterprises to fast, innovative startups, Snowflake helps foster efficiency among teams dealing with a large amount of data.

The startup recently unveiled new automation capabilities for the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse that simplify data warehouse administration and data protection tasks.

Talena

San Jose, Calif.

Top Executive: CEO Nitin Donde

Founded: 2013

Talena provides "always-on" big data management software to help companies protect valuable data assets and iterate rapidly on their business-critical applications. Talena provides backup and recovery, test and development management, and archiving capabilities across Hadoop, NoSQL data stores like Cassandra and Couchbase, and modern data warehouses like Hewlett Packard Enterprise Vertica.

In March Talena launched the ActiveRx predictive analytics infrastructure for big data management tasks. The new technology addresses the question of how to incorporate machine learning into predicting data availability and how to turn backed-up data into active data assets.

Trifacta

San Francisco

Top Executive: CEO Adam Wilson

Founded: 2012

Trifacta's data wrangling software significantly enhances the value of an enterprise's big data by enabling users to easily transform and enrich raw, complex data into clean and structured formats for analysis. Trifacta's focus is on the emerging self-service data preparation space.

In May Trifacta launched a channel program to help recruit reseller, consulting and technology partners and said it intends to grow the percentage of its sales in which partners make the sale and support the product to more than 50 percent.

Zoomdata

Reston, Va.

Top Executive: CEO Justin Langseth

Founded: 2012

Zoomdata develops high-speed visual analytics software for big data. Using patented data-sharpening and micro-query technologies, Zoomdata empowers business users to visually consume data in seconds, even across billions of rows of data. Zoomdata runs on premise, in the cloud or embedded in an application.

Goldman Sachs invested $25 million in Zoomdata in February and the company recently added a second headquarters in San Mateo, Calif. It also hired industry veteran Mike Allen as its new product vice president.