2017 Big Data 100: 40 Coolest Business Analytics Vendors

Critical Analysis

The total amount of digital data is forecast to explode from 16 zettabytes this year to 180 zettabytes by 2025. That includes data generated by IT systems in banking, retail and other industries; social media and other consumer activities; and the billions of networked devices being connected through the Internet of things.

Businesses today are trying to make sense of all this data in order to operate more efficiently, understand their customers' needs, and find any competitive advantage they can.

So it's no surprise spending for big data and business analytics technology and services is expected to grow almost 12 percent a year to $203 billion in 2020, according to market researcher IDC.

As part of the 2017 Big Data 100, we've put together a list of 40 companies that solution providers should be aware of, offering everything from simple-to-use reporting and visualization tools to highly sophisticated software for tackling the most complex data analysis problems.

Alpine Data Labs

Top Executive: President and CEO Dan Udoutch

Alpine Data Labs markets Chorus, an advanced, Hadoop-based data analytics platform that's used for analytical tasks in such areas as financial services and healthcare.

San Francisco-based Alpine Data Labs, launched in 2011, is also positioning itself as a player in the Internet-of-things space, providing its technology to manage the expected massive flow of data generated by connected devices.

Alteryx

Top Executive: CEO Dean Stoecker

Alteryx develops "self-service analytics" tools for data blending, business intelligence and advanced analytics. The self-service part means that data analysts can perform data integration, data preparation and analysis tasks without assistance from the IT department.

In April Alteryx partnered with Amazon Web Services to make the Alteryx Server available through the AWS Marketplace, making it possible to utilize the server's data preparation, blending and analytics capabilities through the cloud.

Founded in 2010, Irvine, Calif.-based Alteryx went public earlier this year on the New York Stock Exchange.

Anodot

Top Executive: CEO David Drai

Anodot's software provides real-time analytics and automated anomaly detection, discovering outliers within large volumes of data and turning them into valuable business insights. The software is used in data-centric businesses such as advertising technology, ecommerce and Internet of things.

Founded in 2014, Anodot is based in Ra'anana, Israel with offices in Europe and Silicon Valley. In less than six months in 2016 the company more than doubled the amount of data analyzed by its proprietary machine learning algorithms to 5.2 billion data points per day.

Arcadia Data

Top Executive: CEO Sushil Thomas

Arcadia Data's Arcadia Converged Analytics Platform combines visual data exploration capabilities with back-end data analytics in a single system that runs natively on Hadoop clusters, helping to overcome the problem of getting value out of Hadoop-stored data.

In March the company debuted Arcadia Enterprise 4.0 with a new user interface and new platform capabilities for building data-centric applications.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based Arcadia Data was founded in 2012. CEO Sushil Thomas, along with other members of the company's startup team, came from such companies as Teradata, Aster Data, IBM and 3PAR. In January the management team was expanded with the hiring of Amir Assar as vice president of sales and Steve Wooledge as vice president of marketing.

Attivio

Top Executive: Stephen Baker

Attivio develops cognitive search software that analyzes unstructured data content, such as large volumes of text, to provide business insights for decision-making tasks. The company's software incorporates natural language processing, machine learning, analytics and knowledge graphing capabilities.

In March Attivio, founded in 2007 and based in Newton, Mass., said it became profitable in 2016 and more than doubled its international revenue. Financial services has become one of the company's most successful markets.

Ayasdi

Top Executive: CEO Bob Griffin

Ayasdi develops machine intelligence software that automates the process of building predictive models and analyzing large, complex data sets. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company was founded in 2008.

Bob Griffin was named Ayasdi's CEO in March, taking over from co-founder Gurjeet Singh who is the company's executive chairman.

Ayasdi has been particularly successful in the healthcare market, developing applications that heathcare providers and payer organizations use to identify best practices for patient care, reduce claims denials, define insurance members' interests and discover genetic relationships for targeted drug therapies. It also develops analytical applications for financial services customers.

Birst

Top Executive: CEO Jay Larson

Birst provides an advanced networked business analytics platform that is built on a multi-tenant cloud architecture and provides a full range of data management and analytic capabilities. The platform creates a set of interwoven analytics and BI instances that share a common data-as-a-service fabric.

Birst was founded in 2004 and is based in San Francisco.

Just last week Birst struck a deal to be acquired by business application vendor Infor, which cited the potential opportunities of combining Birst's data aggregation and analysis capabilities with Infor's applications and expertise in vertical industry business processes.

ClearStory Data

Top Executive: CEO Sharmila Mulligan

ClearStory Data's software simplifies access to disparate internal and external data, including corporate and Web information sources such as Hadoop, relational databases and social media. The company's in-memory database "harmonizes" the data and enables interactive data analysis at scale.

In March ClearStory Data, founded in 2011 and based in Menlo Park, Calif., added "automated smart data discovery" capabilities to its system that makes it easier to find and isolate patterns in large, complex data sources.

Gartner tagged ClearStory Data as a leading "visionary" in this year's BI and analytics platforms magic quadrant report.

Continuum Analytics

Top Executive: CEO Scott Collison

Continuum Analytics develops Anaconda, an open-source analytics platform based on the Python programming language that's become popular for building analytical applications. The platform and related consulting services help organizations manage, analyze and visualize massive datasets.

In January Continuum Analytics, founded in 2011 and based in Austin, appointed Collison its new CEO. Co-founder Travis Oliphant, who previously held the CEO post, became president and chief data scientist, focusing his efforts on managing solutions for Continuum's customers and spurring development within the open data science community.

Datameer

Top Executive: Christian Rodatus

Datameer offers a complete native-on-Hadoop business intelligence system with tools for data integration, preparation, analysis and visualization.

In December Datameer, founded in 2009 and based in San Francisco, named former Teradata, SAP and Enlightened executive Christian Rodatus as its new CEO. Stefan Groschupf, founder and previous CEO, is now CEO of products.

In January the company hired George Shadid as chief financial officer and Jeff Gallagher as senior vice president of sales. The new hires come at a critical stage of Datameer's growth, the company said.

DataScience

Top Executive: Ian Swanson

In September DataScience, founded in 2014, debuted the DataScience Cloud, a collection of tools that data scientists use to find data across a broad range of internal and external sources, develop predictive models that tap into that data, and deploy the applications throughout a company.

DataScience is based in the Los Angeles area in Culver City, Calif. The company raised $26.5 million in Series A financing in 2015.

Domo

Top Executive: CEO Josh James

Domo delivers a cloud-based platform for building business intelligence and data visualization applications that executives and managers use to integrate information from disparate sources, including applications, databases, spreadsheets and more, for decision-making tasks.

Domo, founded in 2010 and based in American Forks, Utah, has attracted a lot of attention for the amount of financing it has raised – nearly $590 million as of its last funding round in March 2016.

In March Domo unveiled a number of new features for its platform, The Business Cloud, including the Alert Center visual console for a company's most-watched metrics, and enhancements to the Analyzer data discovery tool. The company also debuted Mr. Roboto, an advanced intelligence system within The Business Cloud that combines artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics.

Gainsight

Top Executive: CEO Nick Mehta

Gainsight develops a line of business analysis applications used for customer retention tasks including managing the customer lifecycle, identifying cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and managing customer loyalty and churn risks.

Gainsight was founded in 2011 and is based Redwood City, Calif.

GoodData

Top Executive: CEO Roman Stanek

GoodData's focus is providing a cloud-based platform that businesses use to build applications that leverage data to make business decision recommendations and automate business actions in such vertical industries as healthcare, financial services, retail and hospitality.

GoodData was founded in 2007 and is based in San Francisco. Along with selling its software directly, GoodData offers its technology to ISVs who embed its analytical functions within their own applications.

Incorta

Top Executive: Osama Elkady

Incorta offers a real-time data analytics platform that aggregates huge volumes of data in real time in a way the company says makes traditional data warehouse systems obsolete and shortens the time needed to develop analytical applications from months to days. Key to the platform's function is its Direct Data Mapping Engine architecture.

Founded in 2013 by a group of former Oracle executives, San Mateo, Calif.-based Incorta officially launched earlier this year with $10 million in Series A funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures).

Information Builders

Top Executive: President and CEO Gerald Cohen

Information Builders is a long-time player in the business intelligence industry, providing a range of business analytics, performance management, data integration, data quality and master data management software.

WebFocus is the New York-based company's enterprise flagship product. The company also markets a Business User Edition of WebFocus for SMB customers with deployments of up to 100 users. In March the vendor debuted the Omni-Gen Data Quality Edition software for profiling, cleansing and enriching data in databases and corporate information systems.

Earlier this year Information Builders struck a deal with distributor Avnet to resell the WebFocus portfolio through Avnet Technology Solutions. That relationship carried over to distributor Tech Data, which recently acquired ATS.

Interana

Top Executive: CEO Ann Johnson

Interana markets behavioral analytics software that works with event data, such as how customers behave and how they use a company's product. The software analyzes data generated by Web sites and mobile devices, Internet of Things endpoints and sensors, and call detail records – all focused on improving customer engagement and retention in the digital economy.

Interana was founded in 2013 and is based in Redwood City, Calif. In December the company said it had surpassed user and revenue goals for the eighth consecutive quarter, reporting 135 percent growth in annual recurring revenue.

The company raised $18 million in venture funding in November 2016, bringing its total to $46.2 million.

KNIME

Top Executive: President Michael Berthold

KNIME develops the popular KNIME Analytics Platform data mining and processing system. The company regularly scores high on Gartner's annual magic quadrants for advanced analytics and data science platforms.

KNIME is based in Zurich, Switzerland and was founded in 2004.

In March KNIME said that private equity investor Invus had invested 20 million Euro (U.S. $21.7 million) in the business analytics software developer.

Kyvos Insights

Top Executive: CEO Praveen Kankariya

Kyvos Insights develops "OLAP on Hadoop" technology that provides a way to analyze the massive volumes of data businesses and organizations are storing within Hadoop clusters, either through the cloud or on-premise.

In April Kyvos said its flagship product natively supports Google Cloud, joining the product's existing support for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Kyvos Insights was started in 2012 and is based in Los Gatos, Calif.

Logi Analytics

Top Executive: CEO Steven Schneider

Logi Analytics provides a Web-based reporting and data visualization platform that developers use to build business intelligence applications and dashboards and to embed BI functionality into existing applications.

The company launched Logi Info 12.2 last fall with embeddable self-service capabilities that can be tailored to users' roles and skill levels.

Logi Analytics was founded in 2000 and is based in McLean, Va.

Looker

Top Executive: CEO Frank Bien

Looker's Web-based business intelligence platform provides data exploration and analysis capabilities for data that resides in any relational data source, including on-premise databases or cloud systems like Amazon RedShift and Google Big Query.

Last October the company launched Looker 4 with a full RESTful API for customizing the platform's capabilities and pushing data to wherever it's needed.

On March 30 Looker closed an $81.5 million Series D round of funding led by Capital G, Alphabet's growth equity investment fund, along with Goldman Sachs and Geodesic Capital and existing investors. The company, founded in 2011 and based in Santa Cruz, Calif., has raised $177.5 million since 2013.

Maana

Top Executive: CEO Babur Ozden

Maana's Knowledge Platform, incorporating its patented Knowledge Graph technology, uses proprietary algorithms that combine human expertise with data to create digital knowledge. The company's forte is applying its technology to assets or business processes to improve profitability.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company was founded in 2012.

The company's products have had the greatest success in industrial and energy development sectors with Chevron, Shell and General Electric counted as both customers and investors.

MapD Technologies

Top Executive: Todd Mostak

MapD Technologies' flagship analytics software combines a SQL-compliant, in-memory GPU database with a visual analytics engine to create a system the company says can query and visualize huge volumes of data in milliseconds.

The MapD software is finding its way into a broad range of applications including business intelligence, Internet of things, graphical information systems, social media and server log analytics in a number of vertical industries.

In March MapD, founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, raised $25 million in Series B funding.

In April the company launched version 3.0 of the company's software with native distributed scale-out capability for deployment across a cluster of GPU machines. The new release also supports high-availability configurations and offers native ODBC client connectivity.

Microsoft

Top Executive: CEO Satya Nadella

Microsoft markets a broad range of business intelligence tools (from Excel to Power BI), data management software (the SQL Server database) and platforms (Azure HDInsight, the vendor's cloud-based Hadoop system).

Power BI provides data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboard capabilities in a single tool. Since its general release in July 2015 the cloud-based software has become a popular option in the business analytics arena, helped, at least in part, by its low $9.95 per user, per month price tag.

Gartner's 2017 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report lists Microsoft in the leader's quadrant, fueled by the market strength of Power BI. Microsoft ranks highest of all vendors in "completeness of vision" and just behind Tableau in "ability to execute."

MicroStrategy

Top Executive: President and CEO Michael Saylor

MicroStrategy, founded in 1989, is one of the long-established vendors in the business analytics industry and the vendor's enterprise BI software is installed within many large corporations including Pfizer, Netflix, Domino's Pizza and eBay.

In March MicroStrategy, based in Tysons Corner, Va., released MicroStrategy 10.7 with a new data connector developer kit for building links to almost any data source, and improvements for big data analytics and mobile application development.

Panorama Software

Top Executive: CEO Eynav Azarya

Panorama develops the Panorama Necto business intelligence platform that provides analytics, reporting and dashboard capabilities. Panorama emphasizes its centralized approach to BI, which the vendor said simplifies administration, enhances security and improves data management and data sharing.

Based in Toronto, Panorama was founded in 1993.

Pentaho

Top Executive: CEO Quentin Gallivan

Pentaho markets Pentaho Business Analytics, a unified data integration, visualization and business analytics platform.

Last November the company shipped release 7.0 of the Pentaho system with simpler deployment options and improved abilities for visualizing data at any step in the data preparation process – an advance that improves IT-business collaboration to generate higher quality data for analysis.

Pentaho, based in Orlando, was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems in June 2015, but has continued to operate as an independent company.

Qlik

Top Executive: Lars Bjork

Qlik is a leading vendor in the market for self-service reporting and data visualization software with its QlikView and Qlik Sense products.

Qlik, founded in 1993 and based in Radnor, Pa., is regularly listed as an industry leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report.

Qlik was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in May 2016.

In January Qlik said that Qlik Sense Cloud Business, the company's SaaS-based visual analytics software, was available for small and mid-size businesses and for workgroups within larger businesses.

RapidMiner

Top Executive: CEO Peter Lee

Targeting data science professionals, RapidMiner provides a unified predictive analytics platform with data preparation, machine learning and model deployment capabilities.

Founded in 2007 and based in Cambridge, Mass., RapidMiner was named a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science Platforms.

Salesforce.com

Top Executive: CEO Marc Benioff

Salesforce.com may be best known for its cloud CRM applications. But the company has become a significant player in the business analytics arena since debuting its Wave Analytics platform in October 2014. The company now offers sales, service and B2B marketing analytical applications that run on Wave.

Last October the company launched its Einstein technology that adds artificial intelligence capabilities to its sales, service and marketing applications.

SAS

Top Executive: Jim Goodnight

SAS is a longtime leader in the business intelligence software arena, especially with its tools for advanced analytics – it's a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science Platforms report.

SAS markets a broad range of analysis tools including the older SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Enterprise Miner software and the next-generation SAS Viya cloud-based analytics platform and SAS Visual Investigator.

In January the Cary, N.C.-based company reported that sales grew 4 percent in 2016 to $3.2 billion.

Sisense

Top Executive: CEO Amir Orad

Sisense develops a business intelligence platform that the company said simplifies complex data preparation, analysis and visualization tasks with its ability to combine and analyze multiple, large, disparate data sets and share the results using dashboards.

In April Sisense, founded in 2010 and based in New York, debuted Sisense Pulse, machine-learning software that detects and analyzes data patterns to detect changes and anomalies, and issues real-time notifications of business events.

Splunk

Top Executive: President and CEO Doug Merritt

Splunk is the fast-growing developer of operational intelligence software that collects and analyzes machine data – everything from application logs and clickstream data, to sensor data and information from Internet of Things devices.

In February Splunk reported 42 percent revenue growth for all of fiscal 2017 (ended Jan. 31) to $950.0 million.

In April Splunk began offering its software through the Amazon Web Services marketplace.

Sumo Logic

Top Executive: President and CEO Ramin Sayar

Sumo Logic provides cloud-native machine data analytics applications that the company says delivers real-time continuous intelligence across the entire application stack. The system collects and centralizes data from applications, cloud systems, servers, network devices and sensors.

Sumo Logic has found particular success in its use for IT security purposes. In February the company launched a multi-tenant SaaS security analytics service with integrated threat intelligence for use by security operations teams.

Sumo Logic was founded in 2010 and is based in Redwood City, Calif.

Tableau Software

Top Executive: President and CEO Adam Selipsky

Tableau Software markets a line of interactive data visualization software for desktop, cloud, server and mobile deployments.

Tableau, founded in 2003 and based in Seattle, is one of the fastest growing – and certainly one of the best known – business analytics software vendors. It is listed as a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report and was rated the highest among all companies on the "ability to execute" axis, narrowly edging out Microsoft.

In March the company launched Tableau 10.2 with advanced mapping capabilities for geospatial analysis and new data preparation and cleansing capabilities.

ThoughtSpot

Top Executive: CEO Ajeet Singh

ThoughtSpot develops search-driven analysis software, utilizing relational search engine technology, which the company says can eliminate the need for complex BI tools.

ThoughtSpot was founded in 2012 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif. In March the company said it experienced 270 percent growth in customers in fiscal 2017 (ended Jan. 31).

In March the company announced the general availability of new embedded analytics capabilities with the company's new Extended Enterprise Edition of its software.

Tibco Software

Top Executive: CEO Murray Rode

Tibco develops a broad range of software products for data integration, event processing and analytics – the latter including the company's acquired Jaspersoft (reporting and dashboards) and Spotfire (data visualization) software.

Tibco, based in Palo Alto, Calif., has been stepping up its presence in the market for streaming analytics applications with its Tibco BusinessEvents and Tibco StreamBase software.

Veriluma

Top Executive: Elizabeth Whitelock

Australia-based Veriluma develops predictive analytics software that can identify potential business opportunities and risks and offer potential "prescriptive" courses of action to respond.

The company was founded in 2010 and its patented algorithm was originally developed for the Australian Department of Defense.

Wavefront

Top Executive: President and CEO Pete Cittadini

Wavefront develops a real-time analytics platform that businesses use to monitor and manage the performance of their IT systems, from cloud services, to applications, to networks. Using technology developed internally at Google and Twitter, Wavefront predicts and prevents system downtime and diagnoses root causes of problems in real time.

In April Wavefront, founded in 2013 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., struck a deal to be acquired by VMware for an undisclosed sum. VMware plans to integrate Wavefront's technology with its cloud-based vRealize product portfolio for monitoring and managing applications and associated IT infrastructure.

Zoomdata

Top Executive: CEO Justin Langseth

Zoomdata develops big data analytics and visualization software, based on the company's patented Data Sharpening technique for the fast visualization of large volumes of data.

In April the company said its platform was capable of processing data sets with tens of billions – and even hundreds of billions – of records.

Zoomdata, founded in 2012 and based in Reston, Va., said it experienced 250 percent revenue growth in fiscal 2017.