People often ask me if there is a magic quadrant for big data. There isn’t. What we have is a Hype Cycle for Big Data with abundance of big data technologies, some of which are just nascent, some are on the plateau of productivity, and some, like Hadoop distributions, are in the unrightfully dreaded and largely misunderstood trough of disillusionment.
Gartner also has annual cool vendor reports where analysts write about up and coming companies with innovative ideas, services and technologies. Many reports cover awesome big data vendors, for example, Cool Vendors in Big Data, Cool Vendors in Data Science and Cool Vendors in Information Innovation.
Neo Technology is a force behind an open source graph database Neo4j – I think graphs have a great future since they show data in its connections rather than as a traditional view of atomic elements. Graph technologies are mostly unexplored by the enterprises but they are the solution that can deliver truly new insights from data. I wrote about graphs some time ago in my blog post Think Graph.
Keywords: Gartner