Top Business Analytics Startups of 2011
Want to leverage the energy and innovation of a hot analytics startup but not quite sure where to begin? Or perhaps you simply want to keep abreast of compelling trends and young companies?
Whatever your interest, a new International Data Corporation (IDC) report titled “Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch” is a good source of information. It lists vendors that are innovating around three key trends in the business analytics market. These trends are:
Collaborative Decision Management. More companies are using or evaluating analytic software tools that enable the documentation of decision processes, provide contextual collaboration, and improve not only the sharing of information but of experiences, all of which can help shape a decision.
Cloud-based Analytics. Here, too, there is growing interest in using cloud-based tools that ease the acquisition and deployment processes and provide features not found in traditional on-premise software deployments.
Mobile Analytics. The booming mobile space is hungry for analytics tools, primarily dashboards or components deployed on mobile devices. Mobile workforces can benefit from jobs-specific decision support based on analytics, especially within the context of business processes.
Here are IDC’s winners in alphabetical order:
Carrier IQ. Its Mobile Intelligence platform enables mobile service providers and device manufacturers to solve business and technology issues throughout the development and deployment lifecycles of networks and devices. The platform delivers mission-critical intelligence on how services perform and how devices work in the hands of end users.
FirstRain. Its Business Monitoring Engine provides semantic categorization technology that cuts through consumer Web content, delivering relevant intelligence from the business Web. The technology seeks to uncover and collect the most valuable business Web content using algorithms that leverage multiple components, including strength of match, source authoritativeness, degree of duplication and originality, breadth of coverage, freshness, and business relevance.
Glassbeam. Its technology enables manufacturers of compute-centric technologies to gain insights from massive quantities of semi-structured product operational data, such as log data contained in an intelligent device. The solution converts this data into actionable information using technology that scales to analyze terabytes of data.
Infegy. Its Social Radar platform provides intelligent social media monitoring and Web analytics. Delivered through the cloud, Social Radar enables organizations to listen and discern meaning from conversations that occur on the Web and through social channels. Social Radar's patent-pending analytics and algorithms extract sentiment-based information within a historical context. Organizations can then use the information to develop marketing strategies and improve their products and services.
Q-Sensei. Its Enterprise Search Platform addresses the increasing volumes of structured and unstructured information on the Internet, in corporate intranets, on private computers, personal databases and hand-held devices. Q-Sensei’s multi-dimensional searching and indexing engine helps users find relevant “needles” in “haystacks” of data.
River Logic. Its Enterprise Optimizer platform consists of three core products: Cost-to-Planner, which provides insight into which customers and products matter most and how they can be managed at the appropriate cost; Integrated Business Planner, which enhances sales and operation planning through integration of financials, what-if analyses and marginal profitability analyses; and Trade Promotion Optimization Planner, which seeks to ensure maximum return on trade spending by analyzing brand and account-level promotion strategies on an ongoing basis.
To the above list you can add EnvEve, Envirolytics, Localytics, MediaFunnel and Examville, the finalists in IBM’s SmartCamp, an event held in New York this spring to recognize and reward companies dedicated to analyzing big data. A panel of judges and mentors including venture capitalists, academics and business leaders named Localytics the winner based on its innovative technology, aggressive business plan and alignment with IBM's Smarter Planet strategy.
Localytics provides a real-time analytics service that helps the makers of mobile phone and tablet applications better understand their clients. It aims to help businesses build more successful mobile apps by analyzing data on user preferences and tendencies such as the amount of time spent in an application. It also analyzes errors and crashes.
Envirolytics provides a solution meant for home owners, and thus isn’t relevant for enterprises. Here are snapshots of the other SmartCamp finalists that fit into the enterprise space:
EnvEve. This company provides a wireless sensor network and tailored analytics solution that gives organizations real-time information on the environment and physical infrastructures. For example, using sensors and analytics, the solution can help city officials understand the likelihood of a mudslide, the level of toxins in a river, the nitrates in farmland soil or the road conditions of a highway.
MediaFunnel. It provides a social media firewall and dashboard that helps organizations analyze and monitor brand sentiment, protect their brands, and engage with their customers, prospects or members in real-time. The solution strives to ensure that no brand-damaging statements are released to the public, while monitoring social media and the Web for conversations that need immediate attention.
Examville. This vendor offers a global Web-based educational content and services platform that provides collaboration for students, educators and content providers, including publishers. The service leverages the collective knowledge of people with collaborative learning tools, peer reviews, recommendations and educator inputs into a platform that users can customize for their own learning experiences.
