13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013

By Doug Henschen 12/11/2012 From Amazon to Splunk, here's a look at the big data innovators that are now pushing Hadoop, NoSQL and big data analytics to the next level.

Platfora Puts A Lens On Hadoop

Platfora is one of those startups offering a "new-breed" analytics platform built to run on top of Hadoop. The software creates a data catalog that enumerates the data sets available on a Hadoop Distributed File System. When you want to do an analysis, you use a shopping cart-metaphor interface to pick and choose the dimensions of data you want to explore. Behind the scenes, Platfora's software generates and executes the MapReduce jobs required to bring all the requested data into a "data lens."

Once the data lens is ready -- a process that takes a few hours, according to Platfora -- business users can create and explore intuitive, interactive data visualizations. You get sub-second query response times because the data lens runs in memory. Need to add new data types or change dimensions? That takes minutes or hours, says Platfora, versus the days or weeks it might take to rebuild a conventional data warehouse.

Platfora is the newest of new-breed big data analysis companies, but it has a who's who list of venture capital backers and an experienced management team. In short, this is one to watch in 2013.

RECOMMENDED READING

MongoDB Upgrade Fills NoSQL Analytics Void

Amazon DynamoDB: Big Data's Big Cloud Moment

Amazon Debuts Low-Cost, Big Data Warehousing Service

Cloudera Debuts Real-Time Hadoop Query

Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence

Why Sears Is Going All-In On Hadoop

MapR Promises A Better Hbase

Hadoop Meets Near Real-Time Data

MapR's Google Deal Marks Second Big Data Cloud Win

Sears Hadoop Plans: Check Out Data Warehousing's Future

Splunk Answers Business Demand For Big Data Analysis