This article appeared on yourstory.com.
As the data we generate every micro-second grows and accelerates at a rapid velocity, the requirement for making a business decision is shifting from hindsight-based decision making to a foresight-based approach. Companies are banking upon Big Data and analytics.  According to an industry report by NASSCOM – in partnership with BlueOcean Market Intelligence, the analytics market in India could more than double from the current $1 billion to $2.3 billion by the end of 2017-18.
In a nut shell here are three things that Big Data can do for your business:
1. Improve your top line through unprecedented personalization at scale. It can do this by helping you acquire new customers, retaining and up-selling to your existing customers and through customer support services.
2. Improve your bottom line through unprecedented efficiency at scale. The ability to timely tell how long a SKU has been out of stock matters. If suppliers can find out the SKU level they can quickly take decisions to restock.
3. Improve governance through unprecedented monitoring at scale. At US President Obama’s recent visit to India, the government installed 15,000 CCTV cameras. When there is not enough man power to watch all the streams the government can use Big Data to take unstructured data of video streams and run pattern matching algorithms to identify happenings based on certain set-parameters.
Bangalore-based Mu Sigma, started by Dhiraj Rajaram in 2004, has been the category creator in this space and is already estimated to be a billion-dollar-worth entity. And there are several more in the space from India.
Here are 15 Indian Big Data companies to watch out for:
1. Heckyl: TechSparks 2011 winner company in financial data analytics space. Founded by Mukund Mudras, Som Sagar, Abhijit Vedak and Jaison Mathews.
2. Sigmoid Analytics: A TechSparks 2014 company, based out of Bangalore, Sigmoid is in the area of real-time Big Data warehousing, streaming and ETL (extract, transform and load) on Apache Spark. They have a technology infrastructure which companies can use to store their data in a desired format, perform operations on it and generate insights.
3. Flutura:  Mines Big Data to perform analytics and gives hidden insights from huge chunks of machine generated data for global oil and gas majors to bring in efficiency and safety. Flutura was founded by Krishnan Raman, Derick Jose and Srikanth Muralidhara.
4. Indix:  Computes real-time data to give insights for decision makers on an intuitive dashboard. Founded by Sanjay Parthasarathy, the company has its product engineering center based out of Chennai.
5. Fractal Analytics: Helps companies in predictive analytics and decision sciences to understand, predict and shape consumer behavior through advanced analytics, harmonize data, tell visual stories and forecast business performance.
6. Crayon Data:  An algorithm called the WhiteBox, Simpler Choices, takes massive data, cleans it up and presents only actionable insights to banking, hospitality and, telecom sectors. It was founded by Srikant Sastri, Suresh, Shankar and Vijay Kumar.
7. Germin8: It is a leading Data Analytics company that helps brands with social media measurement and monitoring solutions by analysing conversations in real time. The Mumbai-based company was founded in 2007 by Raj Nair and his son Ranjit Nair.
8. Aureus Analytics: With its platform called ASAP (Aureus Statistical and Analytics Platform) it produces insights by mining enterprise data. Aureus was founded by technology professionals Anurag Shah, Ashish Tanna and Nitin Purohit.
9. Dataswft: A product of Bizosys Technologies Pvt Ltd, it has a customized search engine that can decode technical information and return search queries within milliseconds. It was founded by Sunil Guttula, Abinasha Karana and Sridhar Dhulipala.
10. C360:  Corporate360 Pvt Ltd provides IT sales intelligence data services to enterprises. The startup was founded by college dropout Varun Chandran.  Prior to founding Corporate360, Varun was working as sales and marketing executive with the likes of SAP, Oracle, Dell and NetApp. C360 is based in India and Singapore. Another similarly located Big Data company is Antuit holdings, which raised $56 million from Goldman Sachs and Zodius Capital.
11. Metaome: It is a health care Big Data company focused on life sciences, founded by Kalpana Krishnaswami and Ramkumar Nandkumar. Metaome’s products DistilBio a free version web-based graph search and enterprise version platform that accrues a variety of data from difference sources (laboratory data management systems, private and public databases) and makes it structured to help in identifying a pattern.
12. Frrole: It is a Social intelligence startup with a media and brands focused offering, which allows its customers to integrate real-time Twitter data into their digital properties and TV shows. The startup was founded by Amarpreet Kalkat, Nishith Sharma and Abhishek Vaid.
13. Bridgei2i: It focuses on user-centric applications of Big Data. Founders are Prithvijit Roy, Ashish Sharma, Pritam Kanti Paul.
14. Formcept: Focused on making data analysis accessible to everyone; founders are Suresh Srinivasan and Anuj Kumar.
15. PromptCloud has been founded by Prashant Kumar.  PromptCloud is a DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) platform; it crawls the websphere for data extraction and has been founded by Prashant Kumar.
In addition, there are more companies we have not listed that are doing impressive things in the market. DataWeave gives access to curated datasets through APIs. Guavus offers Data analytics solutions. Valiance uses data science for businesses.   LatentView and Vcubec are Big Data consultancy companies. Please share the names of your favorite Big Data and analytics company in the comment section.