In the stage that is the government sector, the scenes proceed with a generous cast of actors. Decision making in government agencies is an elaborate and composite process— it begins with the collection of silos of data from divergent sources, assimilating them into a congruent vessel, and passing the findings, with an agenda, through officials, interest groups, and general citizens.

With a rising number of countries getting the data management power of big data solutions on their radar, the avenue has opened up for design and innovation in these solutions, with the highly complex structure of government processes in mind. Although currently the private sector stands at the forefront of big data innovation, the public sector is now seemingly positioned as the next market to be harvested for the multitude of big data solution vendors. Ironically, few have the will to navigate into these monumental data silos, comprising highly unstructured crude data, waiting to be sorted, wrangled, and digested by the lengthy and cumbersome government protocols.

These solutions have an asking metric of high speed; they must be robust in handing big data of the public sector, and handle it fast. The potential for discovery, value addition, and rich comprehensive insights—from copious sources like paperwork, web, e-mails, phone conversations, and on the more trendy side, IoT devices—is phenomenal.

In the last few months, a distinguished panel comprising of CEOs, CIOs and analysts, along with Gov CIO Outlook’s editorial board reviewed and shortlisted the top companies, at the forefront of tackling big data challenges for the government sector. In this edition of Gov CIO Outlook, we present to you “Top 10 Big Data Solution Providers 2017,” featuring the companies that are delivering promising big data solutions to the government sector.