Big Data has come a long way during the last few years, thanks to the many analysts, researchers, bloggers and innovators. These influencers have explored different ways of implementing big data to improve productivity and the quality of life in our modern societies.
Below is our TOP TEN list of big data influencers in no particular order, for the year 2014.
Bob Gourley
Bob Gourley, founder and publisher of popular big data blog CTOvision.com, was an operational intelligence officer in the Navy, and later became the CTO of Defense Intelligence Agency. In 2007, he started his blog CTOVision.com, which he used to talk extensively about big data and other technologies. CTOVision.com is widely read and followed by top big data entrepreneurs and executives, making Gourley one of the biggest influencers of big data today.
Matt Aslett
The research director of big data management in 451 Research, Matt Aslett is well-known for his Database Landscape Map, published in June 2013. This map is similar to a metro train map, and includes all the key players of the big data landscape. This map is divided into three regions: relational zone, non-relational zone and grid/cache zone. It incorporates all the different processes and elements of big data to give users a basic idea of a big data database.
Kristen Nicole
Kristen Nicole has been writing and editing popular big data blogs to help readers stay on top of the latest in this field. She started with 606tech, where she blogged about social media. Later, she became the chief field editor of Mashhable. Currently she is a senior editor at SiliconANGLE.com. In 2013, she was named as one of the top influencers by Forbes for her extensive coverage of big data news. She also writes for magazines like TIME and Forbes.
IBM
IBM spread the message about Big Data initiatives through multiple channels, which 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, their reach and traffic surpass many other media competitors. For this reason, IBM features in our top five influencers.
Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Apache Software Foundation plays a big role in driving and empowering the big data community around the world and has initiated a good number of projects in the Hadoop ecosystem last year to boost data management and analytics.
Ben Lorica
Ben Lorica is the Chief Data Scientist at O’Reilly Media. Also the Director for Content Strategy in the company, he has successfully implemented big data in a variety of fields such as target advertising, financial engineering, market research and text mining. He also writes big data blogs to help readers stay abreast on the latest big data implementations taking place around the world.
Pete Skomorch
Pete Skomorch is the principal research scientist at LinkedIn and the founder of Data Wrangling that offers consulting services in big data, data mining and predictive analysis. During the last few years, he has focused on creating data driven products. Skomorch is one of the leading big data writers of TechCrunch.
Alexandru Popescu
Alex Popescu is a software architect, who runs a blog myNoSQL. Inspired by open source and community participation, Popescu talked extensively about the notable big data stories. He drew a lot of traffic to his blogs, where some conversations from the community were insightful for readers and big data enthusiasts.
Splunk
Splunk is a popular big data company listed on the New York stock exchange. Last year, this company’s stock rose to all-time high due to its performance in the big data field. With these prices, it set a big precedent for companies working in the areas of big data, predictive analysis and machine log analytics. For setting this new precedent, Splunk made it to our top ten list.
Hadapt
Hadapt came up with its new SQL + PostgreSQL on Hadoop nodes last year. This new product helped companies such as IBM, EMC and others to come up with new products in the SQL region on the Hadoop layer. For inspiring other companies to come up with products in the Hadoop layer, Hadapt is one of our top influencers in 2013.
What do you think of our list? We would love to hear from you!
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