2016 Big Data 100: 50 Coolest Business Analytics Vendors
Big Data Business Analytics
Working with big data remains one of the biggest IT challenges that businesses, government agencies and other organizations face today. It's also one of the biggest opportunities for IT vendors and for solution and strategic service providers. The big data market grew 23.5 percent to $22.6 billion in 2015, according to market researcher Wikibon, and will grow at an annual compound growth rate of 14.4 percent to $92.2 billion in 2026.
The CRN editorial team has created the fourth annual Big Data 100, identifying vendors that have demonstrated an ability to innovate in bringing to market products and services that help business work with big data.
We've broken the 100 into three categories: business analytics, data management and big data platforms and tools, with a slide show devoted to each. Some IT vendors compete in more than one category, in which case we've assigned them to the group in which they are most prominent.
Here are 50 business analytics companies offering everything from simple-to-use reporting tools to highly sophisticated software for tackling the most complex data analysis problems. Slide shows of companies with big data management technologies and companies that provide big data platforms and tools will follow this week.
Algorithmia
Top Executive: CEO Diego Oppenheimer
Algorithmia operates an online marketplace for big data algorithms that software developers use to assemble big data applications. The algorithms range from text analysis and machine learning to utilities and computer vision.
Need an algorithm that can detect faces in images? One that can deduce the sentiment associated with particular words in a document? A dating algorithim for matching people online? Algorithmia has them all.
The Seattle-based company was founded in December 2013. It was the winner of the Startup Showcase at the Strata + Hadoop World show in September.
Alpine Data Labs
Top Executive: President and CEO Joe Otto
Alpine Data Labs offers 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, was recognized as a "visionary" in Gartner's 2016 magic quadrant for advanced analytics platforms.
Alteryx
Top Executive: CEO Dean Stoecker
Alteryx develops "self-service" tools for data blending, business intelligence and advanced analytics – the self-service aspect means that data analysts can perform data preparation, combining and analysis tasks without assistance from the IT department.
Founded in 2010, Irvine, Calif.-based Alteryx has close relationships with Microsoft and Tableau, whose front-end data visualization software products work with the Alteryx platform. Alteryx was also recognized as a "visionary" in Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms report.
Arcadia Data
Top Executive: CEO Sushil Thomas
Arcadia Data develops analytics software that helps businesses overcome the problem of getting value out of Hadoop-stored data. The Arcadia Converged Analytics Platform, a unified front-end visual analytics tool and business analytics platform, uses Hadoop as an operating system and directly accesses data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based company exited stealth last year with $11.5 million in Series A venture financing. CEO Sushil Thomas, along with other members of the company's startup team, came from such companies as Teradata, Aster Data, IBM and 3PAR.
Attivio
Top Executive: Stephen Baker
Calling itself "the data dexterity company," Attivio markets software that helps users find information, including unstructured data, throughout their IT system and work with it for decision-making tasks. Tools include content analytics, data source discovery and search.
In March Attivio, founded in 2007 and based in Newton, Mass., announced a $31 million round of Series E funding that brings its total financing to more than $102 million.
Ayasdi
Top Executive: CEO Gurjeet Singh
Ayasdi develops machine intelligence software that automates the process of deriving insights from large, complex data sets. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company was founded in 2008.
Ayasdi has zeroed in on the healthcare market, developing applications that heath care 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.
BeyondCore
Top Executive: CEO Arijit Sengupta
BeyondCore's software is designed to make business intelligence available to everyday business users with what the company calls "one-click automated business analysis." The technology combines machine learning and regression analysis to identify mathematical relationships within huge data sets – the findings that are statistically significant to the user – without the need for building models or writing algorithms.
BeyondCore, founded in 2004 and based in San Mateo, Calif., recently debuted BeyondCore Analyst for Office, a business analysis tool that's integrated with Microsoft Office.
Birst
Top Executive: CEO Jay Larson
Birst provides an end-to-end business intelligence platform built on a multitenant cloud architecture that offers a full range of data management and analytic capabilities.
Founded in 2004 and based in San Francisco, Birst has been a leader in the concept of "networked business intelligence" that creates a network of integrated BI instances that share a common analytical fabric.
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 system automates data harmonization and enables interactive data analysis at scale.
In March ClearStory Data, founded in 2011 and based in Menlo Park, Calif., launched new data harmonization capabilities called "infinite data overlap detection" that detects and infers patterns and customer-specific data types in every source a user is connected to for analysis.
CognitiveScale
Top Executive: CEO Akshay Sabhikhi
Founded by some of the folks who developed IBM's Watson supercomputer, CognitiveScale develops big data interpretation and machine learning systems for decision-making and customer engagement purposes.
Last year CognitiveScale, founded in 2013 and based in Austin, launched its CognitiveCommerce cloud service targeting analytical applications for retailers.
Continuum Analytics
Top Executive: CEO Travis Oliphant
Continuum Analytics develops Anaconda, an open-source analytics platform based on the Python programming language. The platform and related consulting services help organizations manage, analyze and visualize massive datasets.
In February Continuum Analytics, founded in 2011 and based in Austin, announced that advancements in Anaconda allowed the advanced analytics software to work with Hadoop clusters.
Datameer
Top Executive: Stephan Groschupf
Datameer offers a complete business intelligence system with tools for data integration, preparation, analysis and visualization. In March the company debuted Datameer Cloud, a big data analytics-as-a-service system running on Microsoft's Azure HDInsight system.
Last year Datameer, founded in 2009 and based in San Francisco, raised $40 million in Series E financing.
DataRPM
Top Executive: CEO Sundeep Sanghavi
DataRPM provides its cognitive data science platform that automates machine learning in-cloud or on-premise, allowing businesses to build data systems for predictions and recommendations. Applications include predictive maintenance, product and content recommendations, and churn and conversion predictions.
Founded in 2012, the company is based in Redwood City, Calif.
Domo
Top Executive: CEO Josh James
Domo delivers a SaaS-based system that executives and managers use to integrate information from disparate sources, including applications, databases, spreadsheets and more, for decision-making tasks.
In March Domo, founded in 2010 and based in American Forks, Utah, launched its Buzz social collaboration system that works with its Business Cloud big data system. The company also debuted a mobile app that brings the Business Cloud to mobile devices.
Also in March the company raised a stunning $131 million in Series D funding, bringing the startup's valuation to more than $2 billion.
Fuzzy Logix
Top Executive: CEO Partha Sen
Fuzzy Logix has developed advanced in-database analytical software that accelerates analytical applications by eliminating the need for data extraction, middle-tier analytics servers and redundant storage.
Fuzzy Logix, founded in 2007 and based in Charlotte, N.C., raised $5.5 million in Series A financing in November.
Gainsight
Top Executive: CEO Nick Mehta
Gainsight develops a series 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.
Founded in 2011 and based Redwood City, Calif., Gainsight raised $50 million in Series D financing in November.
Glassbeam
Top Executive: CEO Puneet Pandit
Glassbeam provides machine data analysis software and is taking aim squarely at the Internet of Things arena. The company's cloud-based products, including Glassbeam Explorer and Glassbeam Workbench, help users search and analyze multi-structured data.
In February the company added two products to its lineup: Glassbeam Studio for data transformation and preparation and Glassbeam Edge for device IoT analytics.
Glassbeam was founded in 2009 and is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.
GoodData
Top Executive: CEO Roman Stanek
GoodData's focus is providing business intelligence tools for "data monetization" – the creation and distribution of valuable information and analytical insights to large networks of workers, partners and customers. The software is popular among ISVs who embed GoodData's analytical functions within their software.
GoodData was founded in 2007 and is based in San Francisco.
H2O.ai
Top Executive: CEO SriSatish Ambati
H2O.ai develops an open-source machine learning system for building analytical applications for everything from fraud detection to predicting customer churn.
In November H2O.ai, based in Mountain View, Calif., raised $20 million in Series B financing. The company was founded in 2011 as Oxdata and changed its name in 2014.
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.
The New York-based company's flagship product, the WebFocus business intelligence and analytics platform, is widely deployed for building strategic, enterprise analytical applications. The company recently introduced a Business User Edition for deployments of up to 100 users.
InsightSquared
Top Executive: CEO Fred Shilmover
InsightSquared offers sales performance and marketing analytics applications designed for fast-growing technology companies. The company recently began offering new connectors to more than 50 new data sources including marketing, finance, project management and customer support applications.
InsightSquared was founded in 2010 and is based in Boston.
Interana
Top Executive: CEO Ann Johnson
Interana markets behavioral analytics software that works with event data, including information about 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.
Interana was founded in 2013 and is based in Redwood City, Calif.
KNIME
Top Executive: President Michael Berthold
KNIME develops its popular open-source data mining and processing technology. Gartner rated KNIME a leader in the market research firm's 2016 Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms report.
KNIME is based in Zurich, Switzerland and was founded in 2004.
Kyvos Insights
Top Executive: CEO Praveen Kankariya
Kyvos Insights is one of a wave of startup companies that have developed technology that provides a way to analyze the increasingly huge volumes of data being stored within Hadoop clusters.
Kyvos' software specifically makes it possible to build OLAP (online analytical processing) cubes that tap into Hadoop data for multidimensional analysis. In March the company announced that the Kyvos software works with Azure HDInsight, Microsoft's cloud-based Hadoop system.
Kyvos Insights was started in 2012 and is based in Los Gatos, Calif.
Lavastorm
Top Executive: CEO Peter Shields
Calling itself the "agile analytics" company, Lavastorm, founded in 2012, offers tools for easily building analytical applications that scale up and extract, prepare and analyze data across multiple sources.
In April Boston-based Lavastorm released its Accelerators Library, an array of preconfigured components that make it easier to assemble analytic applications.
Logi Analytics
Top Executive: CEO Steve 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.
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 access to data that resides either in a database or in the cloud. Last year the company debuted reusable, customizable components of business logic called Looker Blocks that can be assembled to create complete business analysis queries.
In January Looker closed a $48 million Series C round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The Santa Cruz, Calif.-based company was launched in 2011.
Luminoso Technologies
Top Executive: CEO Catherine Havasi
Luminoso, which has its roots in the MIT Media Lab, has developed technology that leverages machine learning and natural language processing to analyze text including emails, transcripts and social media posts. That, for example, can help a company better evaluate the market response to a product launch.
Based in Cambridge, Mass., Luminoso was founded in 2010.
Metric Insights
Top Executive: CEO Marius Moscovici
Metric Insights markets what it calls "push technology" – software that tracks key performance indicators across multiple data sources, SaaS applications, big data platforms, business intelligence dashboards and more and sends them to a user's desktop or mobile device.
Metric Insights, founded in 2010 and based in San Francisco, launched Metric Insights Version 4.0 in February. The new edition offers a new Change Reports feature that captures significant data changes.
Microsoft
Top Executive: CEO Satya Nadella
Microsoft, of course, provides a broad range of business intelligence tools (from Excel to Power BI), data management (the SQL Server database) and platforms (Azure HDInsight, the vendor's cloud-based Hadoop system).
Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report listed Microsoft among the market leaders – and the top company in "completeness of vision."
The cloud-based Power BI provides data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboard capabilities in a single tool. Early last year Microsoft cut the price of Power BI from $39.95 per user per month to $9.95 per user per month.
MicroStrategy
Top Executive: CEO Michael Saylor
MicroStrategy, founded in 1989, is one of the leading, established vendors in the business analytics industry and the vendor's software is the enterprise BI system within many large corporations including Adidas Group, Hilton, MetLife and McDonald's.
The MicroStrategy platform, currently on release 10.2, offers a wide range of capabilities including data discovery, enterprise reporting, visualizations and dashboards, advanced analytics, embedded BI and mobile BI applications.
The company is based in Tysons Corner, Va.
Numerify
Top Executive: CEO Gaurav Rewari
Numerify's cloud-based IT analytics applications track the performance of cloud-based IT services and systems, combining and analyzing data from IT sources, call centers, and HR and finance systems to help IT organizations lower costs and improve service levels.
Numerify, founded in 2012 and based in Cupertino, Calif., raised $37.5 million in Series C funding in October.
Panorama Software
Top Executive: CEO Eynav Azarya
Panorama develops the Panorama Necto business intelligence platform that provides analytics, reporting and dashboard capabilities. A key selling point for the software is its integration with Microsoft Office and SharePoint.
Based in Toronto, Panorama was founded in 1993.
Pentaho
Top Executive: CEO Quentin Gallivan
Pentaho markets a unified data integration, visualization and business analytics platform. In April the company debuted Pentaho 6.1 with new metadata injection capabilities that reduces the amount of development time for data onboarding in traditional IT and Hadoop environments.
Pentaho, based in Orlando, was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems in June 2015, but has continued to operate as an independent company.
Platfora
Top Executive: President and CEO Jason Zintak
Platfora is a big data discovery platform that's built natively on Apache Hadoop and Spark. The system connects to an organization's data lake, including on-premise Hadoop clusters or cloud-based data stores, and pulls the data into an in-memory engine for transformation and analysis – especially for customer, security and IoT analytics.
Predixion Software
Top Executive: CEO Simon Arkell
Predixion Software develops Predixion Insight and Predixion IQ, collaborative predictive analytics platforms for business analysts and other non-technical users. The company is particularly targeting real-time advanced analytics and Internet of Things applications.
Founded in 2009 and based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., Predixion Software was recognized as a "visionary" in Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms report.
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's sales grew 10 percent in 2015 to reach $612.7 million.
Qlik, founded in 1993 and based in Radnor, Pa., was listed as a leader in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report.
Rapid Miner
Top Executive: President and CEO Peter Lee
RapidMiner is another player in the predictive analytics software market, offering tools for building predictive analysis capabilities into an organization's business processes.
In January RapidMiner launched RapidMiner 7, a new edition of the vendor's platform, including a new release of the company's flagship product RapidMiner Studio.
Founded in 2007 and based in Cambridge, Mass., RapidMiner was named a leader in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms report. The company received $16 million in Series C funding in January.
Ryft Systems
Top Executive: CEO Des Wilson
Ryft Systems develops hardware/software appliances that use the parallel processing power of FPGA processors to accelerate terabyte- and petabyte-scale data searches and analysis.
The company, based Rockville, Md., raised $4.95 million in venture funding in April.
Salesforce.com
Top Executive: CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce.com, of course, is largely known for its cloud CRM applications. But the company dived into the business analytics arena in October 2014 with its cloud-based Wave Analytics platform and analytics applications, including the Lightning tool for reporting and dashboards. Wave allows users to combine data from Salesforce applications with data from other cloud and on-premise sources.
While Salesforce has reported strong customer adoption of the Wave services, the company hasn't disclosed actual sales numbers.
SAP
Top Executive: CEO Bill McDermott
SAP has been a major player in the business intelligence space since it acquired Business Objects in 2007. Today the company markets lines of analytics products that cover business intelligence and reporting, predictive analysis, performance management, and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software.
In October SAP launched SAP Cloud for Analytics, the vendor's first cloud-only analytics software that will eventually include planning, business intelligence, predictive analytics and GRC capabilities.
SAS
Top Executive: Jim Goodnight
SAS has long been a leader in the business intelligence software arena, especially with its tools for advanced analytics – it's the top company in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms report.
SAS markets a broad range of analysis tools including the SAS 9.4 platform, SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Enterprise Miner. It also provides an extensive lineup of business intelligence products for specific industries.
In April the company debuted SAS Customer Intelligence 360, new digital marketing analysis software that combines data from all digital channels to improve decisions around customer behavior.
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 sharing the results using dashboards.
In January SiSense closed on $50 million in Series D financing and the company said its sales in 2015 grew 100 percent for the fifth consecutive year.
SiSense, founded in 2010, is based in New York.
Splunk
Top Executive: President and CEO Doug Merritt
Splunk specializes in "operational intelligence," offering analytical 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 April Splunk unveiled Splunk Enterprise Security 4.1 and Splunk User Behavior Analytics 2.2.
For its fiscal 2016 ended Jan. 31 Splunk reported revenue of $668.4 million, up more than 48 percent year-over-year from $450.9 million in fiscal 2015.
Sumo Logic
Top Executive: President and CEO Ramin Sayar
Sumo Logic provides a cloud-native machine data analytics service 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.
While Sumo Logic is competing against Splunk in some areas, the company has found particular success in IT security applications.
In March Sumo Logic, founded in 2010 and based in Redwood City, Calif., said it surpassed 1,000 customers in fiscal 2015 and now analyzes nearly 100 petabytes of data daily.
Tableau Software
T op Executive: CEO Christian Chabot
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, was listed as a leader in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms report and was rated the highest among all companies on the "ability to execute" axis.
In March the company launched Tableau 9.3 with new capabilities for analyzing data and sharing results, and improved data preparation capabilities. Also in March Tableau acquired HyPer, a high-performance database system that simultaneously performs OLTP and OLAP tasks, originally developed as a research project at the Technical University of Munich.
ThoughtSpot
Top Executive: CEO Ajeet Singh
Under the marketing mantra "search-based analytics for everyone," ThoughtSpot wants to eliminate the need for complex BI tools. The company's ThoughtSpot Relational Search Appliance combines data from on-premise, cloud and desktop sources, and provides users with the ability to access that data with a simple search interface.
ThoughtSpot, founded in 2012 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., launched its appliance product in October 2014. In December the company released ThoughtSpot 3 with some 200 new features across search, analytics and visualization.
Tibco
Top Executive: CEO Murray Rode
Tibco markets a broad range of software products for integration, event processing, cloud computing and analytics – the latter including the company's Jaspersoft (reporting and business intelligence) and Spotfire (data visualization) software.
Tibco recently updated Spotfire with enhancements to its core virtualization, built-in data access and data preparation functions, and new collaboration and mashup capabilities.
Forrester Research recently recognized Tibco , based in Palo Alto, Calif., as a leader in big data streaming analytics.
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 helps predict and prevent system downtime and diagnoses root causes of problems in real time.
Wavefront was founded in 2013 and is based in Palo Alto, Calif. In February the company raised $11.5 million in Series A financing. In April Wavefront hired former Actuate CEO Pete Cittadini as its new CEO.
Zoomdata
Top Executive: CEO Justin Langseth
Zoomdata develops big data analytics software, based on the company's Data Sharpening technique, for the visual analysis of real-time streaming and historical data. The Reston, Va.-based company also offers Zoomdata Fusion for joining big data with other data stores.
In February, Zoomdata said its 2015 annual recurring revenue bookings grew by a factor of 11 over 2014. In March the company raised $25 million in Series C funding, bringing its total since its 2012 launch to $47.2 million.