Top Big Data influencers of 2013

As we end the year 2013, lets take stock of top influencers in Big Data for 2013. The list is an annual snapshot of people, organizations, products and themes that exercised most influence on the Big Data and Hadoop ecosystem in the year. Click here to read the methodology used. 

Analysts:
Matt Aslett	As research Director for data management and analytics, Matt became one of the most known names in ecosystem with Database landscape map. Resembling a city's metro train network, the chart became a de-facto reference containing names of players in all major variants of database. (Although, the chart was not published this year, it went viral towards the beginning of new year and end of last year.)
Tony Baer	Tony Baer leads Ovum’s Big Data research area. With his insightful thoughts via Ovum engagements and other social media channels like OnStrategies.com blog, Tony continues to unravel deep layers within the ecosystem and complexities around product evolution.
Merv Adrian	Merv Adrian, Research VP at Gartner, was one of the most visible faces this year from Gartner and analysts' space featuring at summits, interviews, client engagements and social media. Although Gartner struck a discordant note earlier in the year with "Trough of Disillusionment" remark on Big Data, Svetlana Sicular and Mark Beyer cleared the air further with cautious optimism notes.
Online Media:
News and Opinion:
Derrick Harris	GigaOm's Derrick Harris covered some of the most topical themes around Big Data and Hadoop through the year. Not just focusing on developing news stories, Derrick gave bigger insights into technology and it's use cases at various organizations.
Blogs and Curated content:
Alexandru Popescu	Alex with his curated blog called myNoSQL and community driven InfoQ continued to drive conversation around some of the most notable stories of the year. Rarely mincing words, he continues to draw big traffic to his blogs.
Focused content:
IBM	IBM drove across the message around Big Data initiatives in online media through multiple channels. The notables one include IBM Data Magazine (weekly publication of articles), IBM Big Data Hub (topical blogs, videos), IBM Developer Works (technical guidance articles) and IBM Journals. Combined together, the reach and traffic surpasses many other media competitors and other promoted content from software vendors.
Products:
Hadapt	Hadapt did not come up with it's tech break-through this year but it had actually set the pigeon among the cats much earlier. With its SQL + PostgreSQL on Hadoop nodes offering, it set a commercial precedent for others to follow. And, what a race did this set off! Following last year's Cloudera Impala, almost everyone from Hortonworks, EMC, IBM and a host of other vendors brought out products in the SQL on Hadoop layer.
Vivisimo	Vivisimo was earlier acquired by IBM and is now called InfoSphere Data Explorer. With its federated search function, it offers search over various data sources including HDFS. It was among the first major commercial product to exhibit leadership in search function on top of Hadoop. As a major trend which came up this year, Hadoop market leader Cloudera and MapR did not disappoint with technical innovation in this area and we expect more to follow.
SAP HANA	SAP, the big gorilla in enterprise software set the ball rolling for wider adoption of In Memory Computing (IMC) with SAP HANA. With HANA becoming an integral part of SAP deployments and upgrade plans, the rest of enterprise market was quick to follow suit. Oracle, IBM and the rest have now IMC as part of their standard database products rather than fancy acquisitions on the shelf.
Repositories:
ASF	Apache Software Foundation continued to incubate newer projects and graduate others within the Hadoop ecosystem. With Hadoop being one of the biggest success in recent history of open source software, ASF continued to take pride in driving the community.
GitHub	The octocat remained the preferred repository of people across the organizations and individual developers. While Twitter released its 100th open source repo on GitHub, others like Cloudera, Facebook and the likes also hosted their components and projects.
Google Code	For the utilities, scripts and other hacks, Google code remained a preferred repository among the developers. Integrated with Google account single sign on and git tools, it offered ease of use to developers.
Social Media:
D J Patil	Former LinkedIn senior executive and currently entrepreneur in residence at Greylock Partners, D J Patil (@dpatil) is also co-credited for the coining the term 'data scientist'. He established an enviable Twitter presence with relevant messages and conversations.
Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro	Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Ph.D. (@kdnuggets) is the President of Kdnuggets consulting and founder of KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data mining conferences). His site and tweets continued to attract substantial traffic and referrals to the outbound links.
Tweet Chat	Entrepreneurs like John Furrier(@furrier) of Silicon Angle with novel Crowd Chat and evangelists like James Kobielus (@jameskobielus‎) with tweet chats found new methods of engaging online community. Coupled with events, these chats drove conversation and engaged thought leaders.
Stock Performers:
Splunk	Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) continued to trade at life time high levels and scorch the market (despite losses). Splunk sets a great stock precedent for machine log analytics and big data companies.
Tableau	Listed with the dream symbol DATA, the visualization software company Tableau has made good progress on stock market since its IPO this year. Tableau's $254.2 million IPO vis-a-vis $45 million VC funding ensured we have another reason to continue investing in similar companies.
Rocket Fuel	Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ:FUEL), a digital advertising company listed on stock exchange this year and its stock went from $29 to $56.10 in its debut, raising $116 million for the company and reaching a valuation of about $1.8 billion. Among the sponsors of this year's Hadoop Summit, Rocket Fuel has been one of the early adopters of Hadoop. We expect more from ad tech industry to follow Rocket Fuel's public listing path.

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