By Bob Gourley

Editor’s note: This list first appeared on our site Analyst One. -bg

In March 2011 Businessweek quoted Cloudera’s Mike Olson describing a “Cambrian explosion” of corporate analytical technology. Mike really nailed it with that one. With the continuous development of advanced infrastructure based around Apache Hadoop there has been an incredible amount of innovation around enterprise “Big Data” technologies, including in the analytical tool space.

This is great for analysts! But it poses some challenges. How do you know which technologies deserve your time and energy? Which firms have something so important that you should push hard to get them into your enterprise? Those are questions we would like to help you address.

We have produced The Analyst One Top Technologies List to help you address those questions. This is a short list of firms that can help you narrow your search for the right analyst-facing capabilities for your organization. We list our methodologies at the end of the list.

The Analyst One Top Technologies List

H2O by 0xdata brings better algorithms to big data. H2O is the open source math & machine learning platform for speed and scale. With H2O enterprises can use all of their data (instead of sampling) in real-time for better predictions. Data Scientists can take both simple & sophisticated models to production from the same interactive platform used for modeling, within R and JSON. H2O is also used as an algorithms library for Making Hadoop Do Math. 0xdata customers have built powerful domain specific predictive engines for Recommendations, Pricing and Outlier detection in Fraud & Insurance. 0xdata is the maker of H2O and nurturing a grassroots movement of math, systems and data scientists to herald the new wave of Discovery with Big Data Science.

Alpine Data Labs makes data science on Big Data accessible to everyone. Alpine has simplified popular machine-learning methods and made them available on petabyte-scale datasets. Alpine’s lightweight web application does this by leveraging the parallel processing power of Hadoop and MPP databases. They deliver on the promise of Hadoop and Big Data, by providing a collaborative and intuitive visual environment for teams to quickly create and deploy analytics workflows and predictive models.

Alteryx, a leader in Strategic Analytics, dramatically improves data analysts’ productivity. The solution enables analysts to blend complex data, build sophisticated analytics in a much easier way than tools like SAS, and simplify how business users consume analytic insights. Analytic applications built on Alteryx enable executives to identify and seize market opportunities, outsmart their competitors, increase customer loyalty and drive more revenue. More than 300 customers, including Experian Marketing Services and McDonald’s, and 200,000+ users worldwide rely on Alteryx daily.

ClearStory Data is making it easy for business users to find, combine and interactively analyze big, diverse data across first-party and third-party sources for immediate insights. The ClearStory Data team has decades of combined experience at Aster Data, BusinessObjects, Cloudera, Google, Facebook, Netscape, Opsware, Oracle, Salesforce.com and Teradata, The company is backed by investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Silicon Valley industry leaders.

Cloudera pioneered the business case for Hadoop with CDH, the world’s most comprehensive, tested and widely deployed distribution of Hadoop. Its Platform for Big Data, Cloudera Enterprise, empowers enterprises to Ask Bigger Questions™ and gain rich, actionable insights from all their data to derive real business value and competitive advantage. As the top contributor to the Apache open source community and leading educator of data professionals, with tens of thousands of nodes under management and hundreds of customers across diverse markets, Cloudera is the category leader that sets the standard for Hadoop in the enterprise. Cloudera delivers capabilities of direct interest to analysts, including tools for data provenance and data search as well as other analytics capabilities. Cloudera also enables almost every other analytical technology available on the Big Data market today.

Cloudwick is a leader in Big Data people, process and technology transformation. With more than 60,000 hours of Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and DataStax production services to leading Fortune 1000 clients like Bank of America, FINRA, Visa, American Express, T-Mobile, Apixio and NetApp Cloudwick is the right partner for your Big Data project. Talk to Cloudwick if you need a team player, team lead or an entire team for your Big Data project.

Datameer’s Hadoop-based Big Data Analytics solution makes it easy for business users to discover insights in any data, regardless of its structure, size or source. With wizard-based data integration, schema-free, advanced analytics and sophisticated data visualization capabilities, Datameer is fully extensible and easily integrates into existing data infrastructures. Datameer scales from a laptop to thousands of nodes and is available for all major Hadoop distributions including Apache, Cloudera, EMC, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR, Yahoo!, Amazon and Microsoft. The Datameer Analytics App Market provides pre-built analytic applications built by subject matter experts to jumpstart the process on common analytical tasks.

DataRPM delivers industry’s first natural language and search-based Business Intelligence platform for Big Data that can be embedded into Data of Everything including software, streaming data, websites, blogs, intranets etc. either on the cloud or on premises. DataRPM’s ground breaking computational search technology enables users to mash-up data from any source for real-time ad-hoc analysis with the ability to just ask questions or search and get back results with rich visualizations and interactive capability to slice-dice, drill-down, filter and collaborate in-place among stakeholders to make informed decisions. DataRPM is privately held and venture funded. It was recognized as one of DC’s hottest startups by the Tech Cocktail Showcase and is ranked as a Top 50 analytics company by Signl.

DataTorrent is the first data & action platform in the world that can instantaneously process streaming data on a massive-scale. Built exclusively on Hadoop 2.0, it lets enterprises process, monitor, analyze, and act on massive amounts of unstructured or structured data in real-time. DataTorrent runs directly in your Hadoop cluster in memory and handles the processing and transformation of your data instantaneously, with built-in fault tolerance and elasticity. Unlike traditional batch processing that can literally take hours, DataTorrent enables immediate “NowTime” decision making.

DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation (DAC) is engaged by commercial and government clients to solve their most complex analytical problems. Their CONTOUR product is designed to digest large volumes of data to distill hidden relationships and meanings. With the ability to work with text, video or voice, in both structured and unstructured formats, users can analyze big data from the web, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or any database of interest to obtain intelligent information responsive to user queries. Of particular interest is CONTOUR’s ability to detect and accurately analyze sentiment which has a significant return for investment and marketing research.

Digital Reasoning enables the automated understanding of human communication. Digital Reasoning’s award-winning machine learning platform, Synthesys, identifies threats, risks and opportunities by transforming information into a private Knowledge Graph. Digital Reasoning is headquartered outside of Nashville, Tennessee, with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York.

Haystax/Digital Sandbox provides analytic software products and services for threat and risk analysis and monitoring to National Security, Public Safety, and Homeland Security missions.  Federal, State, and Local agencies use Digital Sandbox commercial software product suites to quantify and monitor risks from natural and man-made threats, and to direct resources based on threat and risk priorities. Digital Sandbox’s suite of secure and cloud-deployable software tools provide geospatial, temporal, and real-time streaming information feeds to monitor threats and risks for analysts, field operations teams and command staff. Digital Sandbox technology employs patented risk analytics to fuse multiple, disparate information streams and identify priority information dynamically based on sophisticated models of threat and risk.   These analytics are deployed onto the Digital Sandbox commercial software platform and provided directly to operational users through visual displays in command centers, analytic cells, and in the field on mobile platforms.

Kapow Software, a Kofax company, provides an agile Big Data integration platform that organizations rely on to nimbly extract critical information from any source – be it conventional or big data – then make it actionable and accessible across the organization. Kapow Software helps modernize the workplace, improves business processes, and drives better business results. It’s trusted by hundreds of large global enterprises, including Audi, Intel, Fiserv, Deutsche Telekom, NetApp and more than a dozen federal agencies. For more information, please visit: www.kapowsoftware.com.

Karmasphere powers full-fidelity analytics on Hadoop with the most streamlined, open and enterprise-ready approach to Big Data analytics on the market today. The Karmasphere Workspace for Big Data Analytics is uniquely designed to natively extract value from Big Data without the need for abstraction or replication, which significantly reduces total cost of ownership and complexity. To make Big Data readily available to both data and business analysts, Karmasphere provides both Hadoop-standard SQL and visual data exploration. Karmasphere makes it easier for customers, such as Autodesk, Chevron, Chillingo, Intel and Supervalu, to deeply understand their customers and optimize their products, services and customer experience.

LucidWorks, the trusted name in Search, Discovery and Analytics, transforms the way people access information to enable data-driven decisions. Leveraging both structured and unstructured data built on the power of Apache Lucene/Solr open source search, LucidWorks delivers unmatched stability, scalability, and time-to-delivery for search applications. LucidWorks Search provides ease of use development to access up to billions of documents with sub-second query and faceting response time. LucidWorks Big Data tightly integrates key Apache projects needed to build and deploy applications providing ubiquitous access to the data trapped inside Hadoop.

Pentaho is building the future of business analytics. Pentaho’s open source heritage drives continued innovation in a modern, integrated, embeddable platform built for accessing all data sources. With support for all of the leading Hadoop distributions, NoSQL databases and high performance analytic databases, Pentaho provides the broadest support for big data analytics, as well as integration and orchestration of big data and traditional sources.

Platfora’s mission is to empower customers to transform their businesses into fact-based enterprises. Platfora masks the complexity of Hadoop, making it easy for customers to understand all the facts in their business across events, actions, behaviors and time. Follow @platfora and #FactBased on twitter.

Web intelligence is an emerging intelligence capability that draws on the web: the richest real-time information about the world, generated and updated by millions of people every day. Recorded Future organizes this flood of rich, real-time reporting to reveal competitive and risk insights, using a Temporal Analytics™ Engine. Their capabilities serve a wide variety of missions, from predicting market activity to assessing cyber threats to assessing overall risk.

Revelytix produces enterprise software empowering data scientists and business analysts working with Hadoop-based datasets. The Loom Registry brings order to the chaos of Hadoop clusters by managing datasets, recording workflows, and capturing complete data lineage and provenance information. The Loom Server simplifies MapReduce using an extensible workflow paradigm, automatically updating the Loom Registry with workflow results. Revelytix unlocks the full potential of Hadoop — with Loom.

Revolution Analytics delivers advanced analytics software at half the cost of existing solutions. The company brings high performance, productivity, and enterprise readiness to open source R, the most powerful statistics software in the world. To equip R for the demands and requirements the modern data-driven business, Revolution Analytics builds on open source R with innovations in big data analysis, integration and enterprise deployment. Leading organizations including Merck, Bank of America and Mu Sigma rely on Revolution R Enterprise for their data analysis, development and mission-critical production needs. Revolution Analytics is committed to fostering the growth of the R community, and offers free licenses of Revolution R Enterprise to academia. Revolution Analytics is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and backed by North Bridge Venture Partners and Intel Capital.

SitScape’s award-winning, Web-based, User-Defined-Operating-Picture (UDOP) software product delivers the promise of on-demand situational awareness and information at-a-glance with zero infrastructure changes. It empowers knowledge workers to quickly assemble lightweight visual composite Web applications in minutes.

Tableau Software helps people see and understand data. Tableau’s award-winning software delivers fast analytics, visualization and rapid-fire business intelligence on data of any size, format, or subject. The result? Anyone can get answers from data quickly, with no programming required. From executive dashboards to ad-hoc reports, Tableau lets you share mobile and browser-based, interactive analytics in a few clicks. More than 9,000 organizations, including some of the world’s largest enterprises, rely on Tableau Software. Learn more at: www.tableausoftware.com.

Founded by Stephen Wolfram in 1987, Wolfram Research is one of the world’s most respected software companies-as well as a powerhouse of scientific and technical innovation. As pioneers in computational science and the computational paradigm, we have pursued a long-term vision to develop the science, technology, and tools to make computation an ever-more-potent force in the world. At the center is Mathematica, our ever-advancing core product that launched modern technical computing and has become the world’s most powerful global computation system. Mathematica represents a unique blend of major research breakthroughs, outstanding user-oriented design, and world-class software engineering.

Designed to support Big Data, Zoomdata’s Stream Processing technology delivers real time data feeds to tablet and browser based devices. Through the use of touch screen devices, users are able to interact with data in real time, rewind the data, compare the data and share views with their colleagues.

Our Methodologies 

We firmly believe that technologies must be supported by strong companies, so we focus on companies with proven ability to serve in real enterprises. In most cases we select VC backed firms because those come with staying power. We love open source, but open source solutions should also be supported by a strong firm. We also believe it is important to only report on firms that have products that are really available now (no vaporware).  Additionally, we believe most firms that have a capability that can make a difference for the modern analyst will be interested in demonstrating that capability at Hadoop World. This last assumption allowed us to get a jumpstart on our first list. We started our process by reviewing the full list of sponsors and exhibitors at the coming Hadoop World (for a full list of all exhibitors see here). We then reviewed previous research at our CTOlabs.com and CTOvision.com sites to round out this initial list.

We know our methodology has some holes. But as good analysts we are going to keep our eyes and ears open for other technologies we can report on and will modify this list as required. We also know we have you, dear readers, to check our assumptions and give us feedback on the list. If you have or know of a firm we should consider for this, let us know by completing our Analytical Technology Survey Form.