Apache

Given the broad interest in Hadoop as a big data wrangling technology, the Apache Foundation, which hosts the Hadoop open source project, was the most frequently cited “vendor,” accounting for 9.4 percent of the posts Ovum analyzed.

NoSQL database vendor 10Gen came in just behind Apache, at 6.2 percent of all posts. Although 10Gen’s MongoDB is not known for storing high volumes of data, it is associated with variety, given its schema-less architecture. The popularity of the 10Gen brand is attributable to the fact that MongoDB has become for Web developers the document equivalent of MySQL, Ovum said.

IBM has been synonymous with big data, particularly with the use of analytics to sift through massive data warehouses for nuggets of useful business insights. “At IBM, big data is about the ‘the art of the possible,'” said Fern Halper of Hurwitz & Associates. “The company is certainly a leader in this space.” IBM has established a deep portfolio of analytics resources. This includes almost 9,000 business analytics consultants and 400 researchers around the world. IBM has secured hundreds of patents a year in analytics, and has acquired more than 30 companies to build targeted analytics and information expertise since 2005. In addition, the company continues to expand its ecosystem, which today consists of more than 27,000 IBM business partners. IBM currently has analytics solutions centers across the world and has announced it will invest more than $100 million on big data research.

HP Big Data Consulting can help organizations set the overall big data strategy to create a road map of recommendations and initiatives, integrate structured and unstructured data to make the most of existing investments, update infrastructure to facilitate quick search, catalog and index of unstructured data, focus on how and when certain elements of Hadoop can be used to process data volumes, and improve ability to make intelligent decisions through advanced exploratory analytics. HP today also recently announced the first Big Data Solutions training and certification program for the HP Vertica Analytics Platform.

Teradata’s Aster Data Analytic Platform powers next-generation big data analytic applications with a massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics engine that stores and processes big data analytics together with data. Teradata offers a big data analytics framework with pattern and graph analysis that are hard to define and execute in SQL. This framework enables valuable new applications, including digital marketing optimization, fraud detection and prevention as well as social network and relationship analysis.

Machine data, which is generated by sensors or any computer-automated process, is one of the fastest growing and most pervasive areas of big data. It’s also one of the most valuable. Splunk Enterprise is the leading platform for collecting, analyzing and visualizing machine data. Integrated, end-to-end and real-time, Splunk software provides a unified way to organize and extract actionable insights from the massive amounts of machine data generated across diverse sources. Splunk also has been mentioned as a possible acquisition candidate by IBM and Oracle as the two companies vie to expand their big data and business analytics capabilities.

Oracle offers a broad, integrated portfolio of products to help users acquire and organize diverse data sources and analyze them alongside users’ existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. The Oracle Big Data Appliance is an engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database. It combines optimized hardware components with new software to deliver a complete big data platform.

Cloudera, a leader in the Hadoop world, announced in December the close of a new $65 million funding round led by Accel Partners, with support from Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners. The investment will fund global sales growth and fuel continued development of its platform for big data in support of its growing enterprise customer base. The company will expand its international presence with the opening in the 2013 first quarter of its European headquarters in the UK.

In November, Amazon Web Services launched RedShift. Amazon Redshift is a massively parallel, fully managed data warehouse service, designed for data set volumes ranging from hundreds of gigabytes to several petabytes. Redshift claims the data warehouse is effective and affordable for organizations of any size—from a startup to a multinational enterprise. Amazon Redshift is fully managed, so you no longer need to worry about provisioning hardware, installation, configuration or patching of system or database software.

DataSift, developer of a social data platform, gained fame as one of a handful of companies authorized to syndicate the entire stream of public tweets, totaling more than 400 million tweets every day. To enable companies to mine insights, it built a platform to allow companies to create filters to mine and categorize vast volumes of social data and deliver it into business intelligence tools (BI) for further analysis. In August 2012, DataSift, launched Push and Query Builder, which are tools that make it easier for enterprises to mine and filter data from across the social Web and integrate it into their BI platforms and data warehouses. DataSift’s Push and Query Builder tools allow enterprises to easily create filters and combine data with their own enterprise tools to quickly analyze and make sense of important data about their customers, competitors and markets contained in social data sources. The company received $15 million in venture capital funding in November.

SAP helps enterprises incrementally build a big data architecture to speed up operations and support decision making across their organizations. The SAP real-time data platform and analytics applications not only support the collection and storage of big data, but they can also help users understand, analyze and take advantage of the business insights they deliver, according to the company. In September 2012, SAP announced new analytics software that bundles SAP BusinessObjects BI tools and the SAP Sybase IQ server, a high-performance database server designed specifically for analytics.

Hortonworks, a provider of enterprise software based on Apache Hadoop, recently announced the availability of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.2, an open source platform powered by Apache Hadoop. The enterprise-grade HDP includes Apache Ambari, a Web-based tool for provisioning, managing and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters. Hortonworks also recently announced the Hortonworks Sandbox, a new offering to help enterprises quickly get the hang of working with Hadoop and other projects in the Hadoop big data ecosystem.