Part 1 of CRN’s Big Data 100 takes a look at the vendors solution providers should know in the data analytics and business intelligence space.

Gaining Business Insights

Data analytics, business intelligence and data visualization software are critical components of the big data technology stack. They are the tools that everyone from everyday business users to professional analysts use to gain understanding and insights from rapidly growing volumes of data and share that knowledge throughout an organization. They are, ultimately, the means of deriving value from big data.

Global business analytics software sales are expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 10 percent through 2030 when they will reach $172.59 billion, according to a Verified Market Research forecast.

As part of the CRN 2024 Big Data 100, we’ve put together the following list of data analytics and business intelligence software companies—from well-established vendors to those in startup mode—that solution providers should be familiar with.

These vendors offer everything from self-service reporting and data visualization tools for nontechnical managers and business users to high-performance data analytics software needed by analysts to tackle the most complex business intelligence tasks.

This week CRN is running the Big Data 100 list in a series of slide shows, organized by technology category, spotlighting vendors of data analytics software, database systems, data warehouse and data lake systems, data management and integration software, data observability tools, and big data systems and cloud platforms.

Some vendors have big data product portfolios that span multiple technology categories. They appear in the slideshow for the technology segment in which they are most prominent.

Alteryx

Top Executive: Paula Hansen, President and CRO

The flagship Alteryx AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics automates a range of data preparation, analytics and machine learning tasks with built-in data governance and security. Because of its high degree of automation, the system provides self-service capabilities to a broad range of business users.

In May 2023 the company launched Alteryx AiDIN, combining AI, generative AI, large language models and machine learning technology in one system that works with the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform to boost analytical productivity.

In March of this year Alteryx, previously a publicly traded company, was acquired by Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners in a deal valued at $4.4 billion.

AtScale

Top Executive: CEO Chris Lynch

AtScale’s universal semantic layer technology sits between data sources and the tools – data science and business analytics software, spreadsheets, development tools, and AI and machine learning applications – used by “data consumers.”

By abstracting away data complexities, AtScale provides a business-oriented view of data that aids non-technical users, accelerates analytics workloads, and provides a platform for enforcing data governance and consistency.

In 2023 AtScale was named Emerging Partner of the Year by data lakehouse giant Databricks after the two companies expanded their alliance with AtScale support for Databricks’ Semantic Lakehouse architecture and Databricks Lakehouse for Manufacturing.

CelerData

Top Executive: CEO James Li

CelerData offers a high-performance data lakehouse analytics system, based on the StarRocks SQL query engine, through its on-premises CelerData Enterprise software and CelerData Cloud managed service.

CelerData’s founders developed the StarRocks technology in 2020 and originally the company bore the StarRocks name. But the company changed its name to CelerData in late 2022 and in 2023 contributed the StarRocks technology to the Linux Foundation where it resides as an open-source project.

Domo

Top Executive: Josh James

The Domo Data Experience Platform is a cloud-native business intelligence and data visualization system with underlying data integration, data science and AI capabilities. Domo connects to an organization’s data sources, including cloud and on-premises operational applications, data lakes and data warehouses, to provide users with analytical reports, KPIs and data dashboards.

Domo, which reported fiscal 2024 revenue of $319 million, recently announced the general availability of App Studio, a low-code application builder for developing analysis-driven applications. The company also expanded the capabilities of its Workflows low-code automation engine.

Hex Technologies

Top Executive: CEO Barry McCardel

Startup Hex has been getting a lot of attention with the Hex platform, a modern data workspace system for collaborative analytics and data science tasks.

The company’s software includes AI-powered tools, collaborative data notebooks, tools for building applications with data visualizations, and data integration technology – all making it possible to connect and analyze data and share work using interactive data applications and stories.

Hex was founded in 2019 by McCardel, CTO Caitlin Colgrove and Chief Architect Glen Takahashi who previously worked together at Palantir. The company raised $52 million in Series B funding in March 2022.

In October Hex launched Hex 3.0 with new AI capabilities, a new compute engine, a new metadata engine and the App Builder tool for turning insights into interactive experiences. Earlier in the year the company debuted Hex Magic tools that bring the power of large language models directly into the Hex workspace.

Hitachi Vantara

Top Executive: CEO Sheila Rohra

Hitachi Vantara is the data storage, infrastructure and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd.

Hitachi Vantara offers what it calls “intelligent data platforms” that include products for analytics, storage, data management, IoT, data operations and protection, and more. The DataOps Platform Software lineup includes Pentaho Data Integration & Analytics, Pentaho Data Catalog, and Pentaho Data Storage Optimizer.

Incorta

Top Executive: CEO Osama Elkady

Incorta offers a unified data and analytics delivery platform for acquiring, processing, analyzing and presenting decision-ready data. More recently Incorta has positioned its technology as an operational data lakehouse system for data applications and AI and machine learning tasks. It provides data connectors for linking to operational applications and the company’s Direct Data Mapping tools for analytical queries.

In January the company debuted Incorta X, a data analytics system that integrates advanced AI and ML functions with organizational data from multiple sources to speed up analytical tasks.

Kyligence

Top Executive: CEO Luke Han

Kyligence offers data analytics products – including Kyligence Enterprise – powered by Apache Kylin, an open-source OLAP engine for interactive analytics of petabyte-scale data.

In 2023 the company expanded its analytics offerings with Kyligence Zen, an intelligent metrics platform for developing and centralizing all types of business management data metrics into a unified catalog system.

Kyvos Insights

Top Executive: CEO Praveen Kankariya

Kyvos provides a cloud-native, high-speed data analytics system that the company says enables sub-second querying on massive datasets.

A key component of the Kyvos Cloud offering is its universal semantic layer that provides a unified view of business data, no matter the source, standardizes data interpretation and delivers a single source of trusted data.

The platform’s GenAI capabilities provides users with self-service access and helps them interact with metrics in business language.

MicroStrategy

Top Executive: President and CEO Phong Lee

MicroStrategy is one of the long-time leaders in the business analytics space, going to market today with its flagship MicroStrategy One AI/BI platform.

In October the company launched MicroStrategy AI, an addition to its core platform that allows organizations to incorporate generative AI into their data applications. The new software includes Auto Answers self-service analytics, Auto Dashboard for designing dashboards through AI automation, Auto SQL for streamlining database query processes, and Auto Expert for accessing MicroStrategy resources and learning materials.

In September the company expanded its partner program with new partner training and enablement resources, enhanced sales motions and partner incentives, and partner development funds.

Publicly held MicroStrategy reported revenue of $496.3 million in 2023.

MotherDuck

Top Executive: CEO Jordan Tigani

Startup MotherDuck launched the first release of its serverless MotherDuck Cloud Analytics Platform in June 2023, combining cloud and embedded database technology to make it easy to analyze data no matter where it resides.

MotherDuck’s software is based on the company’s DuckDB open-source, embeddable database. The cloud system simplifies the analysis of data of any size by combining the speed of an in-process database with the scalability of the cloud, according to the company.

MotherDuck makes the argument that most advances in data analysis in recent years have been geared toward large businesses and organizations with more than a petabyte of data while neglecting small and mid-size companies with like-sized data volumes.

MotherDuck, based in Seattle, was co-founded in 2022 by Google BigQuery founding engineer Jordan Tigani who today is the company’s CEO. In September the company raised $52.5 million in Series B funding, boosting its total financing to $100 million.

Promethium

Top Executive: CEO Kaycee Lai

Promethium describes its software as the industry’s “first AI-native data fabric platform” that provides a single, unified, consistent view of – and access to – all data from across multiple sources.

Earlier this month the company shipped Promethium Revision18, a new release with new features and enhancements that streamline workflows, improve data governance and provide deeper insights for data engineers and chief data officers.

Pyramid Analytics

Top Executive: CEO Omri Kohl

Pyramid Analytics develops a business and decision intelligence platform that combines data preparation, business analytics and data science functionality in one system.

In March the company launched what it called the first “generative BI” solution through the combination of GenAI-based conversational analytics software – analytics initiated by speech – and its flagship platform. Conversational analytics provides non-technical users with “true self-service analytics” capabilities, the company said.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Pyramid also has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and in New York and is looking to expand its presence in North America.

Qlik

Top Executive: CEO Mike Capone

Qlik is a major player in both the data analytics and data integration technology spaces, allowing the company to offer a complete portfolio of tools for data preparation and analysis.

On the analytics side the company offers its flagship Qlik Sense on-premises analytics software, today targeted toward highly regulated industries. Qlik Cloud Analytics is the company’s popular cloud-based SaaS offering.

Data integration and data quality management have become a big part of Qlik’s technology portfolio – especially after its May 2023 acquisition of Talend. Qlik’s extensive product lineup today includes Qlik Cloud Data Integration and Qlik Replicate, Qlik Compose for building data lakes and data warehouses, and Talend’s tools for data preparation, inventory, catalog, stewardship, and more.

In January Qlik expanded its ability to work with unstructured data by acquiring patents and technology from Kyndi.

Rockset

Top Executive: CEO Venkat Venkataramani

Rockset develops a data search and analytics database that the company says is built for the cloud, offers real-time streaming data ingest and indexing capabilities, with full-featured SQL on JSON, time series, geospatial and vector data functionality.

In November Rockset boosted its software’s AI capabilities by expanding its vector search capabilities with Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search and by supporting the LangChain and LlamaIndex development frameworks.

Rockset, headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., raised $44 million in funding in August 2023, bringing its total financing to $105 million.

Salesforce

Top Executive: CEO Marc Benioff

CRM application giant Salesforce acquired Tableau, one of the long-time leaders in data visual analytics, in 2019. Since then, Salesforce has been integrating Tableau with its other applications through the Data Cloud for Tableau.

But Salesforce continues to market individual Tableau products such as Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and Tableau Prep.

On April 2 Salesforce announced the beta availability of Einstein Copilot for Tableau, an AI assistant that helps business users with self-service analytics and streamlines analyst workflows. (Einstein is a set of AI technologies for the Salesforce CRM platform.)

SAS

Top Executive: CEO Jim Goodnight

SAS is one of the biggest companies in the IT industry focused specifically on data analytics, AI and related technologies. SAS Viya is the company’s flagship analytics and AI platform and the company offers a broad range of analytical software for specific tasks (such as marketing, fraud detection and risk management) and for vertical industries (including banking, life science, public sector and retail/CPG).

SAS has been privately held since its 1976 founding, although the company has taken steps in recent years toward an IPO.

The company has been stepping up its channel efforts including expanding its alliance with Carahsoft in February to boost sales to U.S. government agencies.

Last week at the SAS Innovate conference the company expanded the Viya platform with new generative AI and large language model orchestration capabilities, announced the general availability of the SAS Viya Workbench developer environment for building AI models, and advanced its industry-specific solutions with packaged AI models.

Sisense

Top Executive: CEO Ariel Katz

Sisense markets embedded analytics technology that software developers use to build data analytics and AI functionality directly into their applications. The company’s product portfolio includes the Sisense Platform and Sisense Fusion Embed for infusing analytics functionality into products or services.

In March Sisense announced the general availability of Compose SDK for Fusion, a developer toolkit that the company “enables the delivery of customized data experiences using a code-first, scalable and modular approach.” With the SDK developers can use Sisense’s API-first platform to create dynamic queries, charts and filters directly from application code.

ThoughtSpot

Top Executive: CEO Sudheesh Nair

ThoughtSpot has been one of the fastest growing data analytics companies in recent years, especially after it made a major pivot to the cloud in 2020 with a software-as-a-service version of its ThoughtSpot analytics platform.

The company’s AI-powered ThoughtSpot Analytics platform uses natural language capabilities and a search-based user interface to bring data analytics to a wide audience of users. The company’s product portfolio includes ThoughtSpot Everywhere for embedded analytics and ThoughtSpot Sage, which combines the company’s search technology with large language models.

In July 2023 ThoughtSpot acquired business intelligence software developer Mode Analytics in a move to expand its customer base, accelerate annual recurring revenue and deepen its technology portfolio for data analysts and data engineers.

Tibco, A Business Unit of Cloud Software Group

Top Executive: CEO Tom Krause

Cloud Software Group was created in September 2022 through the merger of Citrix Systems and Tibco Software.

Today the Tibco Platform offers a range of business intelligence, data management, integration and virtualization tools – products that Tibco assembled through a series of earlier acquisitions. The platform runs in the cloud, on-premises and at the edge.