January 2016 Summaries

In 2015, the analytics software market saw significant developments, with trends such as open source, cloud hosting, and SQL on Hadoop continuing to evolve, and AWS Redshift emerging as a prominent data warehouse option. SQL's dominance in the Hadoop ecosystem was reinforced as various SQL-based interfaces gained traction, while open-source machine learning libraries like Google's TensorFlow began to shape the landscape of AI tools. IBM's substantial investment in Spark projects highlighted its potential as a successor to MapReduce, and open-source business intelligence gained momentum with notable acquisitions and new project launches. The rise of AWS Redshift spurred a shift back to the Unified Data Warehouse model from the 1990s, leading to the emergence of startups facilitating data integration and analysis within this framework. Simultaneously, dedicated event analytics companies like Mixpanel and Heap continued to innovate in user behavior analysis, although the rise of affordable data warehousing solutions like Redshift posed challenges to specialized event analytics services. Despite a funding slowdown and valuation adjustments affecting the industry, the year set the stage for further advancements in analytics capabilities and market dynamics as companies navigated the evolving landscape.

In 2015, the tech market experienced fluctuations, with some analytics companies facing challenges, while others positioned themselves for potential growth. Informatica, a leader in ETL software, was taken private in a significant $5.3 billion deal, amid the rise of Hadoop technologies. Horton Works struggled with revenue issues, affecting the outlook for similar companies, while Teradata faced increased competition from cheaper and open-source alternatives. Qlik ended the year relatively stable but faced pressure from slowing growth and competition, particularly in the self-service BI sector. Tableau and Microstrategy both saw modest growth, although Microstrategy faced declining revenues and uncertainties about its new product offerings. Looking ahead, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Amazon emerged as strong contenders poised to capture a larger share of the corporate analytics budget. Microsoft leveraged its integration capabilities and acquisitions, Salesforce capitalized on its existing data ecosystem and analytics offerings, and Amazon's AWS continued to be a critical asset with the introduction of Quicksight. The year ahead promised dynamic changes and heightened competition in the analytics space.