Analyst house Gartner, Inc. has released its newest vendor reporting highlighting three emerging solution providers that offer CIOs innovative alternatives in the data and analytics space. Its Cool Vendors in Application Architecture, Infrastructure and Integration, 2018 zones in on startups that offer some disruptive capability or opportunity. Gartner says that cool vendors “exist across all major areas of technology and innovation” and CIOs that pay close attention to these trends can avoid the “disadvantage in trying to keep up.”

At Solutions Review, we’ve read the full report, available here, and want to take the opportunity to expand upon the introduction Gartner has given to these providers. Though Gartner’s process for selecting Cool Vendors is somewhat mysterious, we believe our unique view of the marketplace can help you to better understand how these tools will fit into the overarching landscape as they mature.

Buoyant

Buoyant is a San Francisco-based startup founded by ex-Twitter infrastructure engineers Oliver Gould and William Morgan. The company builds open source software aimed at helping organizations to run their infrastructure with security and reliability. Buoyant’s two main product lines are Conduit and Linkerd. Conduit is a service mesh designed for running applications on Kubernetes. Linkerd is a transparent proxy that adds service discovery, routing, failure handling and visibility to software applications.

Greenbird

Greenbird offers a hybrid cloud data integration platform designed for smart grid, smart city, and the Industrial Internet of Things. The company’s flagship product is Metercloud, which features pre-built integrations and connectors that require no custom coding. The tool also provides out-of-the-box support to enable integration of software operating smart meters and smart grids. Metercloud is a configurable integration application that utilizes Orchestration as a Service (OaaS) since the platform includes both iPaaS and best practice orchestration. The company was founded in Norway in 2010.

Segment

Segment allows organizations to collect customer data and send it to analytics, marketing automation, and raw data access with SQL. The tool allows users to collect clickstream data from a vaiety of sources with a single API. Users can also use included integrations to pull in contextual data from cloud apps like CRM and payment systems. Segment provides integrations for more than 200 tools and enables personalization of segmented customer groups. The company was founded in San Francisco in 2011.

Read the full report.