Look Who’s Going to the Big Data Party

The exponential growth of data from a widening array of sources is making the term “Big Data” a hot topic among corporate executives from businesses of all sizes across nearly every industry.

The Big Data phenomenon is being fueled by new social networks, mobile devices and increasingly powerful applications that can apture every keystroke and convert it into valuable information. Howevers, the value is significantly diminished unless it can be turned into useful insights that can help corporate executives and end-users make better business decisions on a day-to-day basis.

The good news is that there is a growing assortment of players that are redefining the old ideas of business intelligence (BI) and data integration tools to address the Big Data challenge.

Gaining Insights

Well-known players like Google, IBM, SAP and Information Builders have launched cloud initiatives to help mid-size and large-scale enterprises facing these issues.

Lesser known names, like Kognitio, are also asserting themselves in the Big Data arena. Kognitio, the first to deliver an in-memory analytical platform in 1989, is now offering a secure, private cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Today, gaining insight about important market trends from external information sources is as important as gathering data from internal sources. Alteryx offers a desktop-to-cloud “strategic analytics” solution that captures market and location information to provide organizations with greater insight.

CloudTrigger has leveraged its hands-on, professional services experience to create a set of cloud-based analysis tools that are also leveraging location-tracking data via third-party integrations.

GoodData and Birst are providing flexible tools to put BI in the hands of business end-users. AppFirst is giving IT professionals unprecedented insight into their infrastructure and application performance management (APM). And Host Analytics is converting data into timely corporate performance management (CPM) reports that can guide executive decision-making.

Data Integration

Indicee, founded by the same team that originated Crystal Services and Business Objects, is developing a cloud-based BI platform that other independent software vendors (ISVs) can easily embed into their applications. And LogiXML is offering agile analytics technology that enables organizations to quickly develop and implement BI applications on any platform.

Fusion-io is offering a new storage memory platform that can capture today’s highly dynamic data to support more powerful cloud-based analytic solutions.

Quantivo’s patented analytics platform allows business users to more easily access massive data warehouses to gain better insight and uncover new opportunities that were often hidden in complex storage systems of the past.

The Big Data challenge and new cloud opportunities have attracted plenty of professional service firms as well. For instance, Deloitte has created a dedicated practice to guide its enterprise customers in this area.

And independent software development companies like Agilis Solutions and SoftServe are leveraging these tools to help ISVs and enterprises build custom analytic solutions to meet their unique requirements.

Of course, none of this would be possible without cost-effective data integration tools from companies like Informatica and MuleSoft.

These companies and others will be discussing the latest Big Data integration and BI innovations at the Cloud Analytics Summit on April 25 in Mountain View, Calif.