Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

This article was originally published by forbes.com and can be viewed in full here

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 -2.29% , SAP, Oracle-1.49%, Dell , Hewlett-Packard-1.92% 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.

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