Dec 13, 2021

Datanami Reveals Winners of the 2021 Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards

San Diego, CA — December 13, 2021 — Datanami, the leading publication for news and information covering the operationalization of data science in business, government, and industry, today announced the winners of its sixth annual Datanami Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. The awards recognize the companies and products that have made a difference in the big data community in 2021, and provide insight into the current state of the industry.

Datanami has designated two categories of awards: (1) Readers’ Choice, where winners have been elected by a global community of Datanami readers, and (2) Editors’ Choice, where winners have been selected by a panel of Datanami editors and industry thought leaders. The process started with an open nomination process, with voting taking place throughout the month of October.

“The unprecedented events the past 22 months have put big data and AI into the spotlight like never before,” said Alex Woodie, Managing Editor of Datanami. “Against this backdrop, we celebrate the sixth annual Datanami Readers’ Choice and Editors’ Choice Awards. In this incredibly competitive field, the winners stand out for their ability to forge ahead despite uncertainty and for their devotion to excellence. It’s an honor to be associated with this group of 29 RCA and ECA recipients.”

These awards, now in their sixth year, are gaining recognition as being among the most prestigious recognition given by the big data and AI community to its own each year, and are the only awards that provide open voting to a worldwide audience of end users. Datanami is excited to announce the first annual Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards Party, taking place on Thursday, December 16, at 6pm ET. All are invited to attend to hear lightning talks from three top award winners and participate in big data trivia games with prizes. Please register here.

The 2021 Datanami Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award winners are:

Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Analytics Database

Readers’ Choice: Snowflake

Snowflake Data Cloud delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds; it’s a solution for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing.

Editors’ Choice: Rockset

Rockset helps you build modern data applications and live dashboards in record time, with a real-time analytics database for fast queries on fresh data from databases, lakes and streams.

Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Business Intelligence and Data Visualization

Readers’ Choice: Tableau

Tableau is a leader in the business intelligence and data visualization space, and has been for over a decade. This is the fifth straight year Tableau has won a Readers’ Choice Award in this category.

Editors’ Choice: ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot empowers everyone to create, consume, and operationalize data-driven insights; its developer-friendly platform allows users to embed actionable insights into applications or build an entirely new breed of interactive data app.

Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Cloud Data Service

Readers’ Choice: Neo4j Aura

Neo4j Aura is a fully-managed cloud service used to build apps faster and easier with high query performance, drivers, built-in tools and integrations supported by the largest graph community.

Editors’ Choice: Okera

Okera integrates into infrastructure in the cloud, on premise and with cloud-native and legacy tools – it authorizes and audits every query to comply with data security and privacy regulations.

Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Data Fabric

Readers’ Choice: Google Cloud Dataplex

Google Cloud Dataplex is an intelligent data fabric that provides unified analytics and data management across your data lakes, data warehouses, and data marts.

Editors’ Choice: Collibra

Collibra data intelligence platform unites organizations by delivering trusted data for every use, for every user and across every source.

Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Edge and Internet of Things

Readers’ Choice: Google Cloud Anthos

Google Cloud Anthos unifies the management of infrastructure and applications across on-premises, edge, and in multiple public clouds with a Google Cloud-backed control plane for consistent operation at scale.

Editors’ Choice: Akamai

The Akamai Intelligent Edge is a place where proximity, scale, security, and innovation work together – all backed by a team of experts to help you unlock its full potential.

Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Machine Learning and Data Science Platform

Readers’ Choice: Databricks Lakehouse Platform

The Databricks Lakehouse is a new architecture that combines elements from data lakes and data warehouses in support of high-quality data for analytics and AI use cases.

Editors’ Choice: DataRobot AI Cloud

DataRobot supports the entire AI and MLOps lifecycle – from data engineering and feature selection to model training and deployment – with its AI Cloud.

Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Stream Processing and Streaming Analytics

Readers’ Choice: Confluent Platform

Built by the creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud elevates the popular streaming data system to the level of enterprise-grade software fit for real-time businesses.

Editors’ Choice: Cloudera DataFlow (CDF)

Cloudera CDF is a scalable, real-time streaming data platform that ingests, curates, and analyzes data for key insights and immediate action.

Best Data and AI Product or Technology: Transactional Database

Readers’ Choice: MongoDB

MongoDB’s NoSQL document database has been adopted by millions of Web and mobile app developers thanks to its flexible schema and simple setup.

Editors’ Choice: PostgreSQL

The leading open source relational database, PostgreSQL is enjoying a renaissance among enterprises seeking alternatives to high-price proprietary databases.

Best Data Storage Solution

Readers’ Choice: MinIO

A compact but highly performant object storage system, this open source project is emerging as a alternative to S3, in clouds and on-prem environments.

Editors’ Choice: Seagate

From the edge to the data center to the clouds, Seagate continues to deliver reliable storage for companies of all sizes.

Top 3 Data and AI Open Source Projects to Watch

Readers’ Choice: Apache Spark | MongoDB | Apache Kafka

Editors’ Choice: PostgreSQL | Juypter Notebooks | Elasticsearch

Top 3 Data and AI Startups

Readers’ Choice: Starburst | Rockset | Bigeye

Editors’ Choice: Monte Carlo | Privacera | Varada

Top 3 Data and AI Vendors

Readers’ Choice: Databricks | Snowflake | Confluent

Editors’ Choice: Cloudera | Splunk | TigerGraph

Top Data and AI Achievement

Readers’ Choice: Google Switch Transformer

Google launches Switch Transformers, a deep learning model with 1.6 trillion parameters, dwarfing OpenAI’s GPT-3, which has just 175 billion parameters.

Editors’ Choice: Apache Iceberg

The open source Apache Iceberg table format is poised to solve a data correctness issue that has plagued Apache Hive since the beginning, while providing a common format for Spark and Presto too.

Top Data and AI COVID-19 Use Case

Readers’ Choice: Stanford Workplace Health Innovation Lab

Stanford’s Workplace Health Innovation Lab created Health Check, a centralized system for automating several aspects of COVID-19 containment, including testing, notification, quarantine, contact tracing and vaccine reporting.

Editors’ Choice: TigerGraph and SaH Analytics COVID-19 Tracking for Ivory Coast

TigerGraph partnered with SaH Analytics to build a graph analytics-based COVID-19-tracking application for Ivory Coast’s Ministry of Health that detects, tracks and analyzes infection patterns in real time. Medical staff are then guided — via Google maps and GPS — to those who need medical care

 

More information on these awards can be found at the Datanami website or on Twitter through the following hashtag: #DatanamiRCA21. 

About Datanami

Datanami is a news portal dedicated to providing insight, analysis, and up-to-the-minute information about emerging trends and solutions in big data. The portal sheds light on all cutting-edge technologies including networking, storage, and applications, and their effect upon business, industry, government, and research. The publication examines the avalanche of unprecedented amounts of data and the impact the high-end data explosion is having across the IT, enterprise, and commercial markets. Subscribe now at: www.datanami.com.