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In Pictures: 15 most powerful Big Data companies

Here’s a list of the 15 Big Data companies to watch.

  • The world of big data vendors is divided into two camps. There are the pure-play Big Data startups who are bringing innovation and buzz to the marketplace. And then there are the established database/data warehouse vendors who are moving into the world of Big Data from a position of strength, both in terms of an installed base and a proven product line. Here’s a list of the 15 Big Data companies to watch, divided into 10 that you’re already familiar with, plus 5 newcomers.

  • IBM IBM was the biggest Big Data vendor in 2012 by revenues, with $1.3 billion from Big Data-related products and services, according to a recent Wikibon report. Offerings include server and storage hardware, database software, analytics applications, and associated services. Best known products are the DB2, Informix and InfoSphere database platforms, and Cognos and SPSS analytics applications. IBM also supports the Hadoop open source data analytics platform.

  • HP HP was the second biggest Big Data vendor by 2012 revenues, with $664 million. This vendor also offers a mix of hardware, software, and services. It is best known for the Vertica analytics platform.

  • Teradata Teradata was the third biggest Big Data vendor in 2012, with $435 million in revenues. Teradata is known for its hardware platforms, and database and analytics software. It also offers specific analytic tools for retail and transportation industries.

  • Oracle While Oracle is best known for its flagship database, it's also a big player in the Big Data space. Its Oracle Big Data Appliance combines an Intel server, Cloudera's Hadoop distribution and Oracle's NoSQL database. It was the fifth biggest Big Data vendor in 2012, with $415 million in revenues.

  • SAP SAP offers a variety of analytics tools, but is best known for its HANA in-memory database. It was the sixth biggest Big Data vendor in 2012, with $368 million in revenues.

  • EMC EMC helps companies store and analyze Big Data, and is also home to the Marketing Science Lab, a Big Data analytics think tank that focuses on analyzing marketing data. It made the news this spring with its Pivotal spin-off, also backed by VMware and General Electric. Pivotal will combine Hadoop with EMC's Greenplum database and HAWQ query tools. EMC was the seventh biggest Big Data vendor in 2012, with $336 million in revenues.

  • Amazon Amazon is best known for its enterprise cloud platform, but it also offers a number of Big Data products, including the Hadoop-based Elastic MapReduce, DynamoDB big data database, and the Redshift massively parallel data warehouse that all work well with Amazon Web Services.

  • Microsoft Microsoft's Big Data strategy includes a partnership with Hortonworks, a Big Data startup, and the HDInsights tool based on Hortonworks Data Platform. Microsoft is also known for its SQL Server database, and was the ninth biggest Big Data vendor in 2012, with $196 million in revenues.

  • Google Google's Big Data offerings include BigQuery, a cloud-based Big Data analytics platform. The company had $36 million in Big Data-related revenues last year.

  • VMware VMware is known best for its cloud and virtualization solutions, but it's increasingly becoming a player in Big Data, such as with June's announcement of VMware vSphere Big Data Extensions, which lets vSphere control Hadoop deployments and make it easier for enterprises to launch Big Data projects. VMware had $32 million in Big Data-related revenues last year, almost as much as Google.

  • New names to watch: Cloudera Cloudera is on everyone's list of top Big Data vendors with over $141 million in venture capital funding and founders who include big names in big data from Google, Facebook, Oracle and Yahoo. The company first brought the Apache Hadoop platform to enterprise customers in 2008.

  • Hortonworks Hortonworks is another Hadoop vendor, and has received over $70 million in venture capital investment after spinning off from Yahoo in 2011. It's going up directly against Cloudera, and is best known for its strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Rackspace, Red Hat, Teradata and other companies.

  • Splunk Splunk had the biggest market share of all the Big Data-only vendors, with $186 million in 2012 revenues, according to Wikibon. The company specializes in machine data analysis.

  • 10Gen 10Gen is best known for its open source MongoDB, the leading NoSQL database. Strategic investors include Intel, Red Hat and In-Q-Tel. 10Gen was third among the Hadoop and NoSQL-only vendors last year, with $36 million in revenues.

  • MapR Known for M7, its NoSQL database, MapR works with Amazon's cloud platform and Google Compute Engine. It was fourth among the Hadoop and NoSQL-only vendors last year, with $23 million in revenues.

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