Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and User Segments
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Andrew Brust
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
This Radar report will help enterprise buyers become familiar with streaming data platforms and vendor offerings.
The vendors reviewed in this Radar are cloud providers and incumbent enterprise software players who offer a broad range of data, analytics, and other capabilities for enterprise customers. All the platforms in this report are extremely robust and would compete head-to-head with the specialist vendors if considered on a standalone basis. But what makes them different is that they also have substantial interlock with other components in their vendor’s respective broader platforms. For cloud vendors, this means tight integration with their storage, database, and possibly application platforms. For data platform vendors, it means seamless interfaces with their machine learning and data lake components, as well as their management plane. And for data management vendors, it means tight interplay with their data catalog, data governance, and data quality components.
Yes, specialist vendors offer similar integrations with third-party vendor platforms— including those from the enterprise vendors in this report. But while those integrations make a best-of-breed strategy easier, it’s not the same as using a full stack from a single vendor. The integration will be more complex, as will vendor management and procurement. Furthermore, working with specialist vendors can add expense or inconvenience for customers who have enterprise agreements with large players or have contracted for cloud storage and compute capacity that must be “retired” over a certain period (usually annually).
Specialist vendors’ platforms will work especially well for smaller companies, tech startups, or business units within enterprises that have a streaming-centric mission—that is, their function revolves around canonical streaming use cases—or at least overlaps significantly with them. For companies that have a range of things they do with data, of which streaming is an important but not dominant part, the vendor platforms in this report may be a better fit.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.