There’s big money in big data, and what we are seeing now may only be the tip of the iceberg. Last year, vendors sold software, hardware and support services worth $18.6 billion – 58% more than in 2012. It is predicted that by 2017, it will top $50 billion.
There’s big money in big data, and what we are seeing now may only be the tip of the iceberg. Last year, vendors sold software, hardware and support services worth $18.6 billion – 58% more than in 2012. It is predicted that by 2017, it will top $50 billion.
You may be interested to know that last year, services made up 40% of the total, hardware accounted for 38% and software just 22% – reflecting the fact that while open source software may be free, the hardware and support to run it are not.
Although as I’ve covered previously, plenty of established giants of industry such as IBM and Microsoft have enthusiastically thrown themselves behind big data, it is a fast-growing and ever-changing market where innovation can turn startups into market leaders seemingly overnight.
With that in mind, here are profiles of three key players whose business model has been based on big data right from the start, and who sold over $1 billion of big data software and services between them last year.
Splunk
Splunk offers big data analytical services to businesses and reported that it had generated $283 million in revenue from big data last year.
The California-based company’s solutions offer ways to take machine-generated data and convert it into visualizations such as charts and reports.
Last year it acquired Bugsense, a technology designed to collate and analyze data collected from mobile devices such as smartphones.
Launched in 2003, the company’s services have become hugely successful and like other big data service vendors have branched out into other areas such as cloud hosting and Hadoop services, with Splunk Cloud and Hunk. One of their biggest customers is Dominos Pizza, which uses their analytics services to drive their coupon promotions.
The company takes its name from spelunking – the exploration of caves as a leisure activity (called caving or potholing if you’re not American!)
Pivotal
Pivotal was formed as a joint venture between data storage giant EMC and software company VMware. It was launched to compete with companies such as Google and Amazon offering hosted and managed web services for business.
Its big data products include its own Hadoop distribution, Pivotal HD, and Pivotal Analytics, a subscription-based analytics platform. They are packaged together as Pivotal Big Data Suite.
It also offers a big data consultancy service, Pivotal Data Science Labs, meaning you can hire their data scientists to do your analytics for you.
Pivotal’s sales of big data-related software and services totalled $300 million last year.
Palantir
Palantir – named after magical spying stones in The Lord Of The Rings – was founded principally to combat online fraud, with funding from the CIA.
Initially working on tools to spot fraudulent transactions made with credit cards, the company soon realised the same pattern-analysis methods could work for disrupting all forms of criminal activity, from terrorism to the international drug trade.
It has been credited with revealing trends which have helped deal with the threat of roadside IEDs in Iraq, suicide bombers in Syria and Pakistan and even infiltration of allied governments by spies.
The United States Government is Palantir’s biggest customer, and their software has become one of the most effective weapons in the digital front of the “war on terror.”
The company was also implicated in the Wikileaks scandal, when it was named as one of three tech firms approached by lawyers on behalf of Bank of America, seeking proposals for dealing with an expected release of sensitive information. After its name was linked to the scandal, Palantir issued an apology for their involvement.
The year just gone, they made $418 million in sales from big data services and software.
As always, I hope this post was useful and I am always keen to get your comments and views.
You might also be interested in my new book: Big Data: Using Smart Big Data, Analytics and Metrics To Make Better Decisions and Improve Performance
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