Big Data/Analytics: A Fertile Breeding Ground For Start-Ups?

Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms just touches the tip of the iceberg as far as the number of players in this burgeoning sector are concerned.

The start-up ecosystem is also pretty crowded in this space as many players emerge in different niches based on various horizontal and vertical technology and customer differentiation strategies. Nowhere is the action more visible than the IT Hub of Bengaluru, India.

I recently had an opportunity to meet with three of these.  

Tetrus Corporation headed by Sharad Rao focuses on data-mining and analytics from a US National Security perspective and so works closely with Public Safety, Homeland Security, Justice and Corrections communities. Sharad describes as their key strength the ability to work across traditional data siloes to provide security officials a holistic overview of the data and the ability to recognize threats/opportunities which otherwise may have stayed hidden in the seams. The company now strives to leverage some of the same strengths and capabilities in offerings targeted towards the private sector domain as well as other geographies.

Axtria has focused on the people/expertise aspect building a strong bench of data sciences and analytics expertise hiring some of the best graduates/PhDs from the most prestigious institutions in India/elsewhere. Axtria "Is A Data Sciences Company That Operates At The Intersection Of Deep Analytics, Domain expertise And Technology" is how Manish Mittal , managing principal described themselves.

Sigmoid founded by a bunch of bright sparks from IIT Kharagpur includingLokesh Anand and Mayur Rustagi has gained lot of traction in the retailing space with their SigView: An Integrated Solution, Built for Scale and Speed on Apache Spark. The use of an In-Memory Columnar database with some unique indexing algorithms provides them the ability to ingest large volumes of data and provide quick analytics. Mayur and Lokesh were gung-ho in describing future plans to expand their reach across more industry sectors in the US as well as globally. Also in their plans, launching SigAI: Self learning intelligence system on Apache Spark and Titan Graph.

I was impressed by the capabilities on display and am sure we will be hearing more about these companies in the days to come.

Once again though, this is just the tip of the iceberg...............

Also published on LinkedIn

3 Biggest Challenges in the "Internet of Things" Arena

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Gartner's VP &  Fellow - Technology Visionary & Futurist David Cearley joined the conversation on one of my earlier posts about the Internet of Things: Digital Mesh Or Digital Goo? What will bind the IoT Ecosystem together? 

Call it the Internet of Things (IoT) or The Internet of Everything (IoE), players in this burgeoning field are facing a common set of challenges as I fathomed from a conversation with a leading vendor venturing into this space:

• "Where are the Guinea Pigs?"  (Early Adopters): The biggest one is getting people willing to pay/invest in this area since most are not able to visualize the benefits of the analytics which can be generated or the operational efficiencies which can be realized using IoT/IoE. Vendors have an uphill climb trying to explain how they can help improve operational efficiency till they can find a stakeholder forward looking enough to make the small investments and allow the vendor access to at least a  subset of the environment to do a pilot and prove the use case. The vendors with proven success stories have a head-start.

• "No Cookie-Cutters": Every environment is unique. A cookie-cutter, one size fits all approach cannot work. While a vendor can suggest their platform as a offering they still need to work with other partners to deliver an integrated solution. The vendors are finding themselves challenged to deliver services to the customers tailored to their unique and completely different environments. A big opportunity for strategic/implementation partners.
• "Missing Sensors": The biggest technical challenge is not security as one would expect but the fact that lots of devices do not have the capabilities to capture the data/metrics to generate the required analytics. The vendors need to leverage sensor technology to add sensors to legacy devices to pull back requisite data esp. in the Manufacturing and Buildings industry sectors.

Are you working in the IoT/IoE space? What are some of the challenges you are facing? Please join the conversation.

Originally published on LinkedIn. You can join the conversation there.