Big Data’s Big Players in 2018

The modern tech economy runs on big data. This makes it a leading commodity in a world where knowledge is power. Indeed, the unprecedented ease with which ever larger volumes of digital information can be stored, retrieved, and accessed has created a booming market in the collection and analysis of big data.

Here we’ll define big data in terms of the three Vs: a greater variety of data arriving in ever-higher volumes with increasing velocity. Knowing what big data is helps us understand what big data companies can do for us and which ones are worth noticing in 2018.

What are the “Three Vs”?

One fundamental difference between traditional data and big data is the latter’s bewildering variety. It’s more diverse and far less structured than old data. Preprocessing is needed to shoehorn the different data types produced by tweets, encrypted packets, sensors, photos and sound files, email, presentations, and more into one database or other location.

Big data means a staggering volume of information. Sources like app clickstreams and Twitter feeds produce up to hundreds of petabytes of low-density information that needs to be structured and organized. More people use Facebook than live in China, and the mega-site is home to a quarter of a trillion images.

Lastly, velocity means the rate of incoming data. And in the age of big data, we’re talking fast. For context, Facebook’s users upload more than 900 million photos per day.

Big Data Companies to Watch

Modern IT companies mine big data across banking, health care, education, manufacture, government, retail, and other industries. In 2017, the global marketplace of data management or data analytics reached $21.19 billion and will grow to $77.58 billion by 2023. Keep your eyes on the following big data companies in their respective service categories.

Platforms

The workhorses of big data are the cloud-based systems or on-premise platforms inhabited by big data and the tools and applications that use it.

Dell Technologies provides leading big data software and hardware, from storage media to networking systems and servers. Their Boomi software moves data across the cloud and onsite.

Teradata provides a range of data warehousing and analytics tools known for their scalability and flexibility in processing big data across whole organizations. Their product portfolio includes their Teradata Analytics Platform, cloud-based IntelliCloud analytic software, and Intelliflex integrated data warehouse system.

Data Management & Integration

Data management systems collect, integrate, transform, and organize big data. CRN’s top data management picks for 2018 include Attunity, who offer three core products: Replicate, used for data ingest and replication; Compose, used for data warehousing; and Visibility, for big data usage and visibility.

Also on their list is Iguazio, an Israeli startup that recently debuted their Continuous Data Platform, a unified data turnkey system that diversely sources and analyzes big data to aid in the development of data-driven apps with reportedly excellent in-memory performance at high density and lower costs.

Data Science & Machine Learning

A shortage of trained personnel lies behind recent demands for software solutions to data science and machine learning (ML) problems. A business that developed an open-source option is H2O.ai. Their Driverless AI ML tool automates machine learning and data modeling via visualization features.

In 2018, Bay Area company Splunk acquired ML businesses SignalSense and Rocana. They recently unveiled their first product designed for industrial Internet of Things applications.

Business Analytics

Business analytics is a data-driven method to guide future business planning by shedding light on past performance through iterative techniques like statistical analysis, online analytical processing (OLAP), and predictive modeling. Its tools, which are used by market analysts, statisticians, and others, include analysis and data visualization software.

One of the year’s top business analytics companies, according to Computer Reseller News’ 2018 Big Data 100, is Arcadia Data, a London-based source of business intelligence and unified visual analytics software that can capture and integrate big data from the cloud and data lakes.

Another is ClearStory Data, which offers a data discovery system in the cloud that uses the Apache Spark engine and (as of March 2018) an AI-based system for decomposing and handling complex, blended data.

The race is on for big data solutions in 2018. Armed with a clear grasp of what big data is, the challenges it presents, and which companies excel at rising to them, your business can more than hold its own.

Christian Golden, PhD, writes about tips and trends in digital marketing and social media for TrustRadius. He is a philosopher by day who loves teaching and digging into the big questions. His extracurricular interests include making music, reading comics, watching (really old) movies, and being in the great outdoors.