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How To Find The Best Big Data Product Or Service Vendors?

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The Big Data industry has matured to the point where there are now established markets for the various categories of products and services, which make up the industry. My clients often ask me about the best big data vendors they might use and my answer is that this very much depends on the type of service they are after.

Each service category has its own movers, shakers and heel-snapping underdogs. So I thought it would be worth giving a brief overview of the different types of big data service categories and the businesses jostling for their share of the $125 billion (and rising) big data and analytics market.

It’s worth pointing out that there is a large amount of vertical integration in the industry, with big names such as IBM , SAP , Oracle , Dell , Hewlett-Packard and Amazon offering services which fall into several of these categories. In other words the lines between these categories are not always clearly drawn. Nevertheless there are certain names, which are more strongly associated with particular links in the chain that make up the big data analytics industry.

Data vendors

These are the guys who sell you the raw material of pure, unadulterated data so that you can perform your big data analytics. Commercial big data projects often rely on a mixture of internal and external, third party data. For external, bought-in data, frequently used sources include credit agencies such as Experian who provide demographic data and LexisNexis which sells data related to legal and business proceedings. Other services such as BDEX and DatastreamX and Microsoft Azure Datamarket act as data marketplaces, where businesses can offer their own data for sale as well as buy it in.

Infrastructure and Platform Providers

These are mostly vendors which offer their own installations and services based around the most popular open source Big data technologies such as Hadoop and Spark as well as noSQL database formats such as MongoDB or Cassandra. Market-leading names in this field include Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, IBM and Amazon. These companies generally offer customized installations of Hadoop alongside particular analytics or storage solutions tweaked to their clients’ needs.

Big data consulting companies

Although many of the bigger infrastructure vendors also provide consulting services aimed at helping to get your analytics projects up and running and making the most of the data available to you, specialist consulting companies exist which do this job as well. There is often a fairly large amount of overlap between these companies and the ones which fall under the previous category – with perhaps an important distinction being that companies which specialize in consulting tend not to develop their own distributions of open source Frameworks as, for example, Cloudera and Hortonworks do with Hadoop. Instead consulting businesses may concentrate on building bespoke installations for individual clients, picking modules from different open source frameworks as appropriate. Alternatively they may recommend and implement off-the-shelf solutions such as those mentioned above. Big data consulting vendors include large consulting firms which have their big data practices such as Accenture, PWC and Deloitte as well as many smaller and local operators.

General purpose analytics vendors

These are the guys who write the code which performs the actual number-crunching that makes up the analytics. Once you’ve got hold of your data – either bought-in or digitized yourself from your own internal data, and found somewhere to store it, you will need technology to turn it into those all-important insights. Leading the market for providing systems like this are companies including Datameer, Platfora, Splunk, and Teradata. As with the Hadoop vendors and platform specialists, these companies generally also offer consulting services to make sure their customers are using their in the most effective way.

Specialist analytics vendors

I have split the analytics vendor categories into two because there is a clear distinction between services aimed at tackling general-purpose analytical challenges, and services that specialize in a particular type of analytics. Some companies specialize in specific markets like Palantir who focus on counter-terrorism and fraud analytics. Others focus on specific types of analytics such as sentiment analytics, which is fast becoming a cornerstone of marketing and market research. Here, services have emerged specializing in social media sentiment analytics such as Sysomos, Lexalytics and Meltwater. Other firms specialize in providing analytics solutions for video, transforming the unstructured data from CCTV networks or even Youtube into byte-sized structured data. Names to look out for here include Burst, Brightcove and Wistia. Specialized analytics solutions exist for many other types of data including audio, business logistics and customer service data.

Visualization solutions vendors.

Visualization is the final and often overlooked stage of the Big data analytics process before insights are transformed into action. Visualization can be achieved in generic software like Excel but specialised solutions have emerged for businesses which want to make sure their analytics strategy is clearly communicated to all relevant stakeholders. Some of the key vendors here include Tableau, Datawatch, SAS and Qlik.

Over the next few months I will be taking a closer look at each of these categories and explore the offerings and vendors in more details. So stay tuned…

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