Data is everywhere, streaming in a tremendous flow that has necessitated the rise of specific solutions and technology to handle it. Big data is the term coined by IT folks for this tremendous surge of data. By 2020 the data deluge will increase to 35 trillion gigabytes, flowing in from industrial sensors, internet searches, blogs and social media. Companies evolved software solutions and hardware solutions to handle this deluge and derive meaningful analytics that could serve a variety of purposes in business and government. Some of these companies are top players in big data.
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Hadoop is synonymous with big data, developed by the Apache Foundation. An open source software framework, Hadoop is designed for highly data intensive distributed computing, written in Java. It uses MapReduce to handle data streams across multiple server nodes with a distributed file system to store data on such nodes. The Hadoop framework comprising of Mapreduce, Hadoop distributed file system, Apache Hive and Hbase, handles overall topology, allowing thousands of independent computers to handle terabytes of data. Hadoop is at the core of big data solutions provided by leading players.
IBM grossed over $ 1.3 billion from big data product stream covering server and storage hardware, analytics applications and database software such as Informix, InfoSphere, Cognos, SPSS analytics, and DB2. IBM’s big data solutions have Hadoop based analytics, stream computing, data warehousing and information integration at the core operating on a platform of visualization and discovery, application development, accelerators and systems management.
IBM is followed by HP with revenues of $ 664 million last year, with similar mix of hardware, software and services package for big data. HP’s Vertica analytics has given the company a boost in big data. HP offers end to end solutions based on open source, covering infrastructure to capture, store and scale big data through HP BladeSystems; management through HP Converged App System for Hadoop, technologies including HP Autonomy, Vertica and AppSystem supported by services that help companies make meaningful use of big data.
Teradata grossed $ 435 million last year, offering analytics software, database software and hardware platform in an integrated package. Teradata also offers analytics tools developed for transportation and retail sectors. Teradata’s product package includes Teradata database, the Platform family offering data warehousing for everyone, value analyzer that gives insightful analytics and warehouse miner for data profiling and mining.
Given its strong presence in databases, it is no surprise that Oracle should progress to big data with revenues crossing $ 415 million in 2012. Oracle’s offering includes Cloudera’s Hadoop based distribution package, Oracle’s NoSQL database and Intel server. Oracle offers Oracle NoSQL database and Oracle database for acquisition of big data, Oracle big data appliance, data integrator and big data connectors to organize data and Oracle advanced analytics, exadata database machine, data warehousing and exalytics in-memory machine for big data analytics.
Another big time player in traditional databases, SAP came up with HANA and related analytics tools that helped it top $ 368 million in 2012. SAP HANA, integrated with Hadoop allows text content searches, real-time predictive analytics, capability to analyze billions of rows in seconds and exploit unstructured big data such as documents, social media content and documents. HANA also offers predictive insight through data mining and allows users to leverage open source R analytics.
While the above mentioned companies are strong in internet, social media and general big data, there is one company, Splunk that focuses on machine data generated through automated sensors. Splunk Enterprise platform collects, visualizes and analyzes machine data from diverse sources in real time.
Upcoming names in big data are Cloudera, DataSift, Platfora, Precog, Hadapt, ZettaSet and Datameer to name only a few of big data companies likely to make an impact in the future.
