As the exploding big data market enters its second decade, vendors are forming identifiable “galaxies,” providing structure to what has been a chaotic universe, writes Wikibon Big Data and Analytics Analyst George Gilbert. In his latest Professional Alert, available to Wikibon Premium subscribers, he identifies three major groupings of vendors around similar strategies:

1. IBM, Palantir Technologies, Inc., Accenture PLC, and Teradata Corp. offer consulting-led template solutions. Their templates have varying degrees of repeatability, but with each engagement they become more repeatable and less customized.
2. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP SE and Splunk, Inc. sell big data tools and application-led platforms. Tools are experiencing the greatest innovation the data management sector has seen in decades, and the platforms are growing at the expense of of individual products.
3. Dell Inc., and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. are selling converged private cloud infrastructure packages. They package these to appeal to specific markets, including big data and Internet of Things (IoT).

Notably absent from the list, he writes, are Cloudera Inc., Hortonworks Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc., which continue to seek a business model that focuses on big data platform sales.

The full alert examines each of the vendors leading the three market sectors. Gilbert recommends that customers identify their starting point – services, application platforms or converged infrastructure – and create strategic relationships with their vendor(s) of choice.

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