The Big Data Ecosystem: Who’s In and Who’s Not

The big data frenzy is methodically conquering one market after another. As this trend continues—this is the best time for big data technology companies to gear up to for market leadership positions in the diverse sub-segments of the market.

CIO Review analyzes the market and selects 100 big data solution providers slated to dominate the future market in the areas of big data management, infrastructure, analytics, visualization, security solutions, web and mobile apps, consulting, and the rest. In the last few months, a distinguished panel comprising of CEOs, CIOs, VCs, industry analysts and the editorial board of CIO Review selected the Final 100 after a careful evaluation of vendor capabilities. These 100 short-listed companies have been selected as most fit to take on the big data market challenge.

As the big data technology promises such gainful ROIs as immense operational cost savings, data-driven insights into customer behavior, sales or marketing metrics, operational stats, social engagements to guide future business strategies or remedial actions, it is imperative that the right tools and technologies are made available to enterprises based on their planned budgets. The CIOs or IT departments have to collaboratively assess the overall business goals, then explore and identify the matching big data solutions to maximize the returns from investments.

The current big data technology wave is such that most enterprises or organizations are baffled or confused by the overwhelming range of big data solutions available in the market.  For these enterprises, gleaning the massive big data vendor list to track down the most relevant solution is no easy task. Most technology adopters look for simple and user-friendly interfaces, easy to use functionality, and excellent technical or customer support teams to bridge the gap between implementation, training and successful BI endeavors. As CIO Review comments, the main goal behind selecting a big data vendor is to achieve actionable decision empowerment.

So here is a list of 10 vendors from CIO Review’s 100 Most Promising Big Data Companies 2014:

7SEGMENTS: As 7SEGMENTS firmly believes that customers are a business’s key asset, the company provides big-data-enabled solution for customer intelligence that enables companies to detect gaps and opportunities for better customer experience. Their targeted campaigns are designed to heighten the customer experience with custom messages. The company’s Big Data solutions fully adapt to clients’ needs. 7SEGMENTS’ CRM product facilitates collection and maintenance of the entire customer data in a central location online for later use. The CRM tool exploits funnel analysis approach to derive actionable insights from customer behavior and business performance.  Says Iozo Kovac, Founder and CEO:

The best thing about the solution is when a client requests new type of analysis, other clients in our cloud may access the new feature too. So they learn from each other and apply the same methods on their own data with different results,

7SEGMENTS Campaigns happens to be their actionable campaign-management tool, which is capable of executing marketing campaigns and measuring key metrics simultaneously. 7SEGMENTS Optimization, is another tool set—providing functionality for customer segmentation, product recommendation, and predictive analytics.

Actian:  This Company’s analytics product is highly flexible and easily overcomes technical and economic hurdles of adopting big data on any hardware platform. The big data solution is known for its agility, scalability, and performance in delivering big data solutions.

Manhattan Software: Manhattan’s analytics platform is reportedly the first portfolio analytics and benchmarking product enabling automated decision making in the real estate and facility business. With a unique blend of data populated by Manhattan’s and IWMS solution, which includes information on—Manhattan Analytics  presents critical information on occupancy, total cost of occupancy, utilization, portfolio size, etc. visually on maps and charts. The powerful visualization capability of this product helps organizations to quickly detect real-estate zones that need cost optimization and effective use of resources.

The analytics solution creates actionable intelligence from real estate and facility management knowledge to aid industry executives in critical decision making. Manhattan’s client base required real-time data as it happened for immediate remedial action; so the company responded to their need with Manhattan analytics platform. There are annual surveys and studies that organizations can participate in to gather knowledge, but what we are offering is true real time benchmarking, says, Craig Gillespie, CEO, Manhattan Software.

Exosite: Founded by three entrepreneurs, Hans Rempel , Troy Kopischke and Danny Cunagin—this industrial internet company helps clients acquire, store, visualize and interact with the data in real time. The company also offers a powerful development framework on the Cloud that enables agile prototyping and deployment of client’s own industrial internet applications.

With Exosite solutions, clients can aggregate and monitor real-time data, leading to a reduced downtime, quick detection of malfunctioning equipment, and risk mitigation. With these solutions the clients can also get ahead of the game with predictive actionable intelligence; run powerful scripts combining multiple lower level inputs and build custom dashboards that report on real-time metrics; and take action on trends and predictive events.

Exosite provisioned advanced wireless monitoring capabilities to SmartPack compactors, which made trash collection easy and more efficient With Exosite’s cloud-connected trash compactors, Harmony Enterprises was able to accurately capture, analyze, and process the data, as well as add valuable features to their existing product lines, improve service contract margins, establish the brand image, and reduce operational costs by automating the process of notifying local waste haulers when the compactors need to be emptied.

Forum Analytics: According toPaul Sill, Principal and CEO of Forum Analytics, the biggest obstacle to a wider adoption of predictive analytics across enterprises is the lack of client data integrity, unrealistic expectations regarding the worth of analytics, and inaccurate interpretation of analytical, which can lead to misapplication.

We use data mining and predictive analytics to solve discrete, clearly-defined business problems. Working closely with the client before work begins to clearly define the objectives of the analysis is critical to overall success, say Sill. The strength of Sill’s consulting business lies in collaborating with the client at the outset of an analytics project to define and discuss clear outcomes of an analytics exercise.

Manthan: Atul Jalan, Founder and CEO of Manthan, says To survive, you need data at the heart of your business. And to win, you need analytics to think for your business.

Manthan offers analytics products for the retail and CPG industries. Their broad aim is to connect the new retailer with new shopper through analytical insights. Now that technology enables custom messages to be served to the customer, big data analytic scan make substantial impact on a retailer’s bottom line. Big data analytics drives core business processes today, and this is what Manthan leverages its business on. The ability to maximize the potential of big data analytics in improving a retailer’s bottom-line has brought Manthan an impressive list of clients across 18 countries. The impressive client list includes brands like McDonald’s, Ripley, Novartis, Love’s, Teavana, and many more.

MapR: This company’s distribution of Apache Hadoop with a proven, enterprise-grade development platform combines a wide set of open-source packages such as Apache Mahout, Spark, Hive, Pig and ZooKeeper. The innovative approach taken by this company has resulted in a differentiated Hadoop platform to address enterprise customer applications and uses. The MapR environment is specifically designed for the data center or the IT operations. In this environment, Hadoop provisions an infrastructure to address big data applications that cannot afford to lose data and require immediate recovery from node and site failures. MapR provides excellent capabilities for the broadest set of Hadoop applications from batch analytics to interactive querying and real-time streaming.

Matter-sight: Building upon the philosophy that personality matters both in personal and business relationships, this company has created Predictive Behavioral Routing, the flagship product, which analyzes customer and employee behavior, employee’s desktop data, and other interaction data to connect customers to the most suitable employee, which results in cost savings, low attrition, improvement in sales margins, and enhanced customer satisfaction. The combined effect of all these results is the ultimate goal of any business—customer retention, which would not have been possible with random customer and agent connections. Matter-sight’s SaaS-based delivery model engages the customer as a partner in extracting valuable business insights through analytics on the cloud.

Metric Insights: This company’sproprietary Push Intelligence Platform has the capability for delivering only those KPIs that matter to a client—thus minimizing dashboard overload.  The Metric Insights solution can be easily integrated with a client organization’s existing BI or big data infrastructure. Metric Insight’s patented technology, the KPI Warehouse collects metrics from the customer’s existing BI, SaaS, and big data platforms. The offered platform includes a collaboration layer for providing a context to the data.

Metric Insights provides automated, personalized alerts to users in the event of any significant change in the data, removing the need for constant human monitoring.

Mosaic Data Science: This company believes in offering extraordinary value to data projects. Realizing that data science is much more than just analyzing data extracting insights, their Data Science team actually solves complex optimization problems like improving the operational efficiency of air traffic safety. Mosaic’s experts begin with project assessment, and then move onto project scope and planning for data-related opportunities.  In the later phases, the team of experts may execute several steps like analytics, BI, risk and decision analysis. Their impressive client list includes verticals such as medicine, finance, media and telecommunications.

Moser Consulting: For over 10 years, this company has been helping its clients meet their big data requirements through their Big Data initiatives and Managed Services offerings. Moser Consulting continues to focus on services related to big data infrastructure and consolidation of disparate data sources. Their main business objective is to provide tools to free up valuable data storage spaces sot ha clients can utilize that space for data analytics and exploration.

To give an example of their customer-centric solutions, this company provided a custom solution by utilizing Hadoop and Cascading technologies, by which a client was able to complete a processing job in 15 minutes, which was originally taking about 20 hours to complete.