GigaOm Radar for Streaming Data Platformsv3.0

1. Summary

This Radar report will familiarize organizations with the most active vendors in the streaming data platform space. These vendors include streaming data specialists, cloud providers, data platform vendors, and enterprise incumbents. Each of these vendor types has a particular niche that will resonate with different enterprise needs.

For example, specialist vendors will likely appeal to organizations with business processes pertaining to quintessential streaming data use cases such as stock trading, fraud detection, and e-commerce, as well as location, process, or health monitoring. Those with applications involving the industrial internet, the internet of things (IoT), edge computing, online advertising or adtech, web analytics, and financial markets may gravitate toward these solutions. For these use cases, data streaming is the principal means of ingesting data, messaging and event processing are the principal means for sharing data, and data streams are often the targets for landing the data.

The other types of vendors highlighted in this report offer streaming data capabilities within a wider ecosystem of product offerings, approaches, and methodologies. For instance, enterprise data management vendors incorporate their streaming data technologies alongside components for data quality, information governance, and data cataloging. With these solutions, streaming data tooling is simply one part of a larger framework.

Cloud vendors reviewed in this report tend to couple their streaming data services tightly with their offerings for storage, databases, and analytics applications. Data platform vendors typically ingrain their streaming data utility into tools for data lakes and ML. It’s essential for buyers to be aware of these differences in the way vendors position their streaming data solutions so they know how well those vendors will meet their requirements. Similarly, this foresight helps to prepare for specific use cases by revealing additional components with which organizations will need to integrate—as well as how to do it.

We review each data streaming platform included in this report against the same capabilities (key criteria) and non-functional requirements (evaluation metrics). Thus, despite the points of distinction in their viability for specific applications, these platforms are objectively reviewed in as much of an “apples-to-apples” comparison structure as is possible. How they measure up for specific organizations depends on those organizations’ use cases, their existing infrastructure, architecture of choice, and long-term and short-term goals.

This GigaOm Radar report highlights key streaming data platform vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Streaming Data Platforms,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.