Archetypes of Data Analytics Providers in the Big Data Era

The ability to generate business-relevant information and use it to improve business processes is a fundamental lever to achieve competitive advantages and to increase organizational performance today. The increasing relevance of analysis activities goes along with a rising number of data analytics providers, which help companies to implement their analytics initiatives. However, these providers widely vary in their focus, functionalities and technologies, so that the overall market can be characterized as heterogeneous and unclear. To shed light on the complex landscape of BA applications and services, we contribute an empirical taxonomy and elaborate on five archetypes of analytics providers (i.e., BI & Advanced Reporting, ETL-Based & Advanced Data Management, and Data Mining) resulting from a cluster analysis of 97 analytics providers.