Big Data is often associated with big vendors—the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAP.

But the industry is also full of up and comers and niche specialists that could make an impact on a market said to be worth more than $32 billion by 2017.

Gartner has released a list of five Big Data vendors to watch, as enterprises search for technology to draw intelligence from the vast amounts of information collected daily.

Analyst Svetlana Sicular posted the list June 17 with the caveat that there are “many more companies that do interesting things around Big Data.”

Big Data has become an industry buzzword tossed around by vendors to describe nearly every possible approach and technology related to data collection and analytics.

While not a complete list, Sicular’s choices represent a start in looking for vendors in the nascent market. A Gartner survey of enterprises last year found that 64 percent were investing or planning to invest in Big Data technology.

Here’s Sicular’s list:

Neo Technology. The company is behind the open source graph database Neo4j, which developers describe as an embedded, disk-based, transactional Java engine that stores structured data in graphs rather than tables. While mostly unexplored by enterprises, Sicular believes graph technologies can deliver “truly new insights from data.”

Splunk. One of the first Big Data companies to go public, Splunk has a product called Hunk that Sicular says is more mature than most in the market. “Hunk is easy to use compared to many Big Data products,” she said.

MemSQL. The company’s in-memory relational database is effective for mixed workloads and for analytics. Sicular said the product appears to be less expensive and more agile than SAP’s heavily marketed HANA.

Pivotal. The vendor’s technology helps solve a Big Data problem that Gartner calls the “Nexus of Forces,” which is the convergence of cloud, mobile, social and Big Data. Eventually, actionable intelligence will have to be drawn from across these areas and Piovotal is making headway in doing that.

Teradata. Despite being a pure-play data-warehousing vendor, the company provides a unified data architecture that combines the best of Big Data and data warehousing. “Enterprises need both,” Sicular said.

Other companies Sicular said were worth noting, but were not on the list included analytics companies Actian and Datameer, predictive analytics vendors Revolution Analytics and Ayasdi, data integration firms Pentaho and Denodo, Big Data cloud providers Qubole and Altiscale, Hadoop vendor Cloudera and Concurrent, which provides a development framework.

PAW is hosting its Predictive Analytics World on October 5-9, in Boston, MA.

By Antone Gonsalves, Cruxialcio
Originally published at www.cruxialcio.com