Businesses today recognize that data has become a strategic asset on the same level as their workforce, financial capital, and physical plants and equipment. Data is critical for both day-to-day operations and long-term planning.
And, when utilized effectively, data is key for major initiatives such as digital transformation and for identifying new opportunities and creating competitive advantages. With the growth of data marketplaces, data is even becoming a major revenue driver for some businesses.
Collecting, managing, analyzing and sharing data has become a herculean task, however. The volume of data created, captured, copied and stored is projected to exceed 180 zettabytes by 2025, according to Statista.com. Adding to the data management challenge is the fact that an increasing amount of that data – structured, semi-structured and unstructured – is often spread across many locations in multiple cloud and on-premises systems.
Not surprisingly, as businesses and organizations wrestle with big data challenges, market researcher IDC is forecasting that spending for big data and analytics tools and platforms will grow at a CAGR of 23.6 percent between 2022 and 2026.
To help solution providers that operate big data practices—or are thinking of starting one—CRN provides the Big Data 100, an annual list of leading vendors in the big data space with innovative, forward-thinking products and services that solution providers can offer their customers for managing, utilizing and analyzing big data
As in prior years, this 11th edition of the Big Data 100 list includes many of the IT industry’s biggest vendors and established suppliers of data management and business analytics products. But it also includes startups and young companies that are developing breakthrough technologies that solution providers can adopt to provide their customers—and themselves—with a competitive edge.
Given the dynamic nature of the big data industry, this list is ever changing. Just last week IBM announced a deal to acquire data analytics startup Ahana. And Qlik, one of the top companies in the data analytics category, is in the process of acquiring Talend, a developer of data management and integration software.
This year’s Big Data 100 list is made up of six technology categories including many of the same technology categories as in previous years: data analytics software, database systems, data warehouse and data lake systems, data management and integration software, and big data systems and cloud platforms. Slide shows for each technology category, along with a slide show of the key startup big data vendors across all categories, will be running throughout the week.
This year we’ve added data observability as a technology category in the Big Data 100 list. Data observability has become an increasingly important part of the big data space with tools for both monitoring data quality and reliability and for collecting IT system and application data for performance management tasks.
In previous years we’ve included a machine learning category in the Big Data 100. But that segment has become so large that a list of 10 vendors would not do it justice. So this year we have removed that sub-category with an eye toward assembling a separate list of machine learning companies sometime in the near future.
