So here we are again. My colleague Shivon and I had made a first attempt at making sense of the rapidly evolving big data ecosystem back in June. Based on some very helpful feedback from readers of this blog and others, a number of additional meetings with interesting startups and more in depth research, we’ve come up with this second version.

Some thoughts:

It’s still a work in progress (and will presumably always be, that’s the nature of the beast)

It’s even more crowded than the first time around, which reflects the incredible vitality of the big data space

We’ve created some new subcategories such as NoSQL/NewSQL and analytics services (reflecting the reality that, for the time being, the last mile of data analysis is very much performed by humans)

We have the occasional company that appears in different categories (Infochimps or Autonomy for example)

We have learned more about companies that were already on the first version of the chart, and have positioned them differently. For example, Metamarkets now falls in the “Cross Infrastructure/Analytics” category as they offer a stack that includes a data store (Druid), predictive analytics and visualization. Another example is Collective[i] – they have built an entire proprietary big data stack from the ground up, that includes infrastructure, analytics and applications – making the company a rare example of an “Application Service Provider”.

Our goal is to continue updating this chart from time to time, and perhaps make it evolve visually, as we’ve probably reached the limits of what we can reasonably fit on one slide. It was suggested that we try to visually distinguish on premise offerings vs. cloud based solutions, which we may try to do.

To enlarge, click on the arrows at the bottom right of the chart.

Comments, thoughts, questions? Please add to the comments section.