While Leo keeps a sharp eye on the Big Players in Big Data, I’ve been scouring the landscape for smaller companies that are carving out distinctive niches for themselves in this rapidly evolving market. These smaller companies will tend to be more volatile than most of the well-established firms, but they can also offer big rewards.

Many large enterprises are struggling to capture and interpret information that is spread across various analytic systems, each system handling different types of processing and data. Two of the most interesting companies that are helping corporate America make this transition are Teradata and EMC Corp.

Teradata (NYSE: TDC) just released its first-quarter earnings report on May 8, and for the second straight quarter it surpassed most analysts’ expectations. The Dayton, Ohio-based company reported earnings of 54 cents per share. Total revenue increased to $628 million, up from $587 million in the first quarter of 2013. Yet the price-earnings ratio is only around 19 – cheap for a growing company in an exploding market sector.

Organizations today are looking for ways to scale the breadth and sophistication of their data analytics to respond to the demands of business operations. The challenge is how to best orchestrate a wide variety of file systems, storage techniques, procedural languages and data types into one cohesive and system.

To deliver value from big data, customers should be able to create a system that allows the integration of analytic processes across parallel databases rather than separate servers. And with economic growth still rather sluggish for this phase of a recovery, companies are trying to put in new systems without breaking the bank.

The company recently unveiled its largest data storage tool yet, the Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6750 (EDW). This new platform has been designed to meet the needs of the largest and most demanding real time workloads, with thousands of applications. It also has the ability of allowing unlimited concurrent users to run unlimited queries against 61 petabytes of data.

Teradata Active EDW has the capability to automatically bundle memory as well as solid state drive SSD and traditional disk storage to allow users get memory speed combined with depth of analysis. The tiered memory architecture has been developed based on the data’s frequency of use.

Teradata also has a new software product called QueryGrid that it says is the most flexible solution available. “After the user selects an analytic engine and a file system, Teradata software seamlessly orchestrates analytic processing across systems with a single SQL query, without moving the data,” said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. “In addition, Teradata allows for multiple file systems and engines in the same workload.”

On May 5, Teradata’s board of directors authorized an additional $300 million to be utilized to repurchase Teradata common stock under its open market share repurchase program. Teradata now has a total of approximately $550 million authorized for share repurchases under its share repurchase program.

A similar company – in fact, a competitor to Teradata in several areas – is EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). The Massachusetts-based firm has strong existing relationships with several big companies for managing their data storage needs, and has been making a valiant effort to keep up with the fast-changing marketplace.

EMC has just inked a deal to acquire privately-held DSSD, Inc. Menlo Park-based DSSD is the developer of the leading flash storage architecture for in-memory databases and Big Data workloads like SAP HANA and Hadoop.

Menlo Park-based DSSD will operate as a standalone unit within EMC’s Emerging Technology Products Division.

As customers take advantage of the mega trends of social, mobile, cloud and Big Data, it will become critical to store and analyze the vast amounts of data that do not fit into main memory. Having assembled one of the most accomplished systems and storage engineering teams in Silicon Valley, DSSD says it has cracked the code on this dilemma.

David Goulden, CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure, said, “EMC established a relationship with DSSD more than a year ago. EMC led the Series A investment in DSSD and has remained an active development partner. We’re now thrilled to be joining forces with Andy, Bill and the entire DSSD team. While flash is among IT’s most disruptive technologies, its impact and opportunity will become even more pronounced as customers enter the 3rd Platform of IT.”

Products based on the new DSSD rack-scale flash storage architecture are expected to be available in 2015 and will be optimized for activities such as risk management and fraud detection. High-performance applications used by research and government agencies, such as facial recognition and climate analysis, will also be part of the company’s services.

Both of these companies have bright futures. Based on its strong May 8 earnings report, Teradata seems to be the better bet. We’re adding Teradata to the Next Wave Portfolio, up to a buy limit price of 45.

EMC is currently a ‘hold’ recommendation in our Equity Trades portfolio since it jumped up in value shortly after we recommended it in December. We recommend a buy if it falls below 24.