Small Data Group

As social channels continue to feed the big data hype machine, I figured it would be insightful to fire up my favorite social search tool to see which vendors are making the grade (or dominating the conversation) when it comes to social discussions. This post summarizes what I found after a couple evenings of analysis, so it’s not meant to be exhaustive by any stretch, but hopefully provides some interesting insights – and a starting point for further analysis.  Thanks for checking it out!

For a first cut, I used Topsy, an excellent search tool we’ve used for social strategy projects at The Pulse, and took a look at mentions of the hashtag #bigdata along with 35 of the top vendors in the space (e.g., #bigdata AND Google) over a 30 day period ending before the end of November, from ALL sources (links, Tweets, Photos, Videos, Experts) on Twitter. Not surprisingly, IBM is dominating the discussion, with over 1000 mentions, followed by EMC (381), SAP (375), Google (355) and Microsoft (310).

Among upstarts, Cloudera was right behind Oracle and HP at 158 mentions, with Splunk (72) and MapR (58) getting their share of social buzz. Interestingly, some much bigger players like Hitachi (only 15 mentions), Xerox (8) and Fujitsu (8) are failing to generate much social chatter related to big data – at least on Twitter.

Here is the full roundup:

To get a better view of social activity weighted by resources I compared the social mentions to the latest vendor data from Wikibon – and more specifically looked at the ‘mentions’ rank vs the revenues rank. So IBM, with the top social mentions AND the top revenue, was right at mid-table (or ‘0’). While standouts (largest difference between social rank and revenue rank – what I’ll call ‘Social IQ’) were QlikTech, Tableau, MapR and Cloudera. Perhaps not a surprise since all are relatively young/small, but well-funded and clearly hitting the social trail big time.

Perhaps a surprise in this cut of the analysis is the strong performance of Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and EMC, showing that all are getting the word out and associating their offering with the big data movement. Note that if a vendor was not included in Wikibon they won’t be in the following chart!

Here’s the full results for the Social IQ of the top big data vendors based on mentions vs revenues rank:

So, who are the ‘social stars’ at this point? Among big companies, IBM, EMC, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle stand out.  And among upstarts, clearly QlikTech, Tableau and Cloudera are making the grade.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on other vendors I should include in this study. And please suggest other measures as well for the next cut at the analysis. Thanks again for stopping by!