In our report Tech Impact ’19: How technology is used by the UK’s fastest growing businesses, we drilled into three of the technology categories that are used most by the fastest growing businesses compared to other businesses. At the top of the pile was the Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Visualisation category, so we wanted to look at some of the stand-out channel partners in the sector.

The sector

To recap, BI and Data Visualisation is used by businesses to make sense of data and display it in digestible formats, allowing businesses to make more informed decisions and drive growth. It has become particularly valuable in the age of big data, where patterns and trends can not only be difficult to identify by other means, but effectively impossible.

Businesses that are better able to identify patterns and trends within data are, of course, better positioned to take advantage of opportunities and mitigate threats. This is reflected in the eight-percentage-point higher sales growth over three years that Fast Track 100 companies using the technology have seen as opposed to those that do not use it and their average of £15-million larger overall sales.

All this is well and good, but sector-level figures like this can feel a bit ephemeral and abstract. So, who are the businesses most embodying this? To find out, we set search parameters within our platform looking at businesses within the BI & Data Visualisation sector and then sorted businesses by growth.

The platform returned 496 channel companies with a significant focus on BI and Data Visualisation, averaging gross profit in the last year of 32.78%. Averages of 34.03% the year before and 37.81% the year before that indicate that the market is getting more competitive and difficult to retain profit margins. If we wanted to drill further into that list, we could filter it further by factors like geography, year-end dates or tech-stacks. For now, though, here are the growth stars...

The businesses

QuantumBlack (quantumblack.com)

Turnover: £17.16m
Growth: 205.43%
UK employees: 122
Founded: 2011
End-of-year: 31/12

QuantumBlack is an analytics firm “operating at the intersection of strategy, technology and design” that aims to improve performance for its clients.

Merkle | Periscopix (periscopix.co.uk)

Turnover: £31.31m
Growth: 144.2%
UK employees: 166
Founded: 2004
End-of-year: 31/12

Merkle | Periscopix is a Performance Marketing agency providing pay-per-click management, SEO, programmatic display, paid social, creative, digital analytics consulting and conversion rate optimisation.

Amsphere (amsphere.com)

Turnover: £3.65m
Growth: 107.4%
UK employees: 64
Founded: 2002
End-of-year: 31/03

Amsphere is a specialist provider of business analysis, software testing and knowledge acquisition services.

Oliver (oliver.agency)

Turnover: £86.72m
Growth: 89.5%
UK employees: 431
Founded: 2003
End-of-year: 31/12

Oliver is a strategic and creative agency that builds dedicated teams that work inside its clients.

Forward3D (forward3d.com)

Turnover: £109.24m
Growth: 83%
UK employees: 216
Founded: 2011
End-of-year: 31/12

Forward3D is a global digital performance marketing agency that specialises in data-driven search and display marketing campaigns with “industry-leading” data science, technology and performance linguistics.