As IoT data-enabled services continue to expand, real-time data integration and streaming analytics are becoming very sought after. Data integration, ingestion, real-time stream processing, and streaming analytics services currently fall under the umbrella of Data Management services within the IoT value chain, where each component has also seen economic growth.
At ABI Research, we estimate that IoT data management services constitute a young and rapidly growing market that currently stands at $9 billion (as of 2020) and is expected to reach $39 billion by 2026. In addition, data integration and ingestion is made up of 21% of IoT data management services in 2020 and will grow to 39% in 2026. The overall forecasted revenues also include data storage, as storage technologies play an integral role in the other data management services that happen both upstream and downstream from data analytics functions.
To highlight this potential, ABI Research developed a competitor ranking to offer an unbiased assessment and placing of data management (exempt of storage capabilities) suppliers. The ranking covers seven vendors providing stream processing and streaming analytics technologies for IoT enterprises: Guavus SQLstream, ScaleOut Software, Striim, Hazelcast, StreamSets, StreamAnalytix by Impetus Technology, and KX Technology Inc.
Criteria, Methodology, and Who's Who
The assessment process examines, among other things, to what extent the vendor's solution(s) can normalize, cleanse, aggregate, and augment data on real-time IoT streams. The level of the sophistication of the solution(s) is also assessed based on the real-time integration of predictive, ML, and AI technologies, and vendors' go-to-market strategies.
Guavus SQLstream, from AI-based analytics provider Guavus, a Thales company, comes out as an overall leader for data management and streaming analytics technologies due to its strong performance in the telco vertical, alongside multiple other IoT use cases and sophisticated Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) and predictive analytics capabilities of the solution. Guavus SQLstream also scored top marks for implementation due to the company's wide-ranging partnerships, including strategic alliances with AWS, and Google, as well as its capabilities for working with a wide range of clients across different verticals.
What makes the solution unique is that it is code-based, its architecture is written in SQL, and it has Java adapters. However, since the publication of this assessment, Guavus SQLstream has strengthened its positioning in the low/no-code category. In early 2021 SQLstream released a new product update: StreamLab — an addition that enables data acquisition, discovery, and analytics at the capacity of 32-byte events: 13,000,000 events per second within the low code environment. StreamLab provides users with intelligent, contextual suggestions that are packaged within a wide variety of the generated templates.
A truly differentiated and exciting new feature of StreamLab enabled by Guavus SQLstream automated data discovery and parsing capabilities is “smart-suggestions” that assist users in evaluating and automating the analytics near-real-time. The immediate (<1s) query results and data scrutinization enable suggestion-based drag & drop development, empowering analysts to build any vertical application quickly. The “smart suggestions” functionality is expected to be extended towards the ML functions on the “hot” streaming data allowing enterprises to bring advanced real-time analytics even further. Combined with real-time visualization and a customizable dashboard, StreamLab targets both the business analyst community, and data scientists and developers, serving all users with low code and custom code features accelerating application time-to-market. Find out more.
Close behind SQLstream were Striim and Hazelcast. Both vendors showed strong data integration capabilities, Change Data Capture (CDC), hybrid cloud data processing capabilities, and excellent scalability through distributed cache systems.
ScaleOut Software is the leading vendor in innovation domain, owing to its highly effective Digital Twin Streaming Service that can track telemetry streams, data aggregation tools, and trend recognition capabilities of multiple devices' telemetry. Similarly, Hazelcast scored high on account of its newest product — Hazelcast Jet with sophisticated predictive streaming analytics, which looks for anomalies via visualization tools.
The ranking showed that simple User Interface (UI) and self-service wouldn't get vendors far in innovation scores. There is an apparent demand for a more sophisticated coding environment to implement solutions that target developers in the analytics. It should be noted that while there are no "bad" solutions on the market, higher innovation scores were given to solutions offering complex coding tools to augment IoT streaming analytics with ML and predictive models.
ABI Research's Competitive Rankings report is part of the company’s M2M, IoT & IoE research service, which includes research, data, and analyst insights. Competitive Ranking reports offer comprehensive analysis of implementation strategies and innovation, coupled with market share analysis, to offer unparalleled insight into a company’s performance and standing in comparison to its competitors.
