All Things Analytics: Analytics On Demand

Showing posts with label Analytics On Demand. Show all posts

Friday, April 19, 2013

Democratization of Business Analytics Dashboards

I am super impressed with the following visual dashboard from IPL T20 tournament - IPL 2013 in Numbers. For those of you not so familiar with cricket or IPL, IPL is the biggest, the most extravagant and the most lucrative cricket tournament in the world. I like the way IPL is bringing sports analytics to the common masses.

What is impressive is that each metric (runs, wickets, or tweets) is live so these numbers get updated automatically, pretty cool for IPL and cricket fans. Also, each metric is clickable so one can drill down to his or her heart's content. This is a common roll-up analysis but the visualization and the real time updates make this dashboard pretty appealing. IPL team, thanks for not putting any dials on this dashboard (LOL).

I have been influencing and now building analytics products that power these sports and various other dashboards/reports for many years. The most fascinating thing is that these dashboards (or lets call it analytics in general) are reaching the masses like never before. Everyone has heard of terms like democratization of data and humanization of analytics. This is it! The data revolution is underway.

Now, there are many new frontiers to go after and the existing ones need to be reinvented. Yes, the analytics market is ready for massive disruption. This is what keeps me excited about Business Analytics space.

Happy Analyzing and Happy Friday!

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Tale of Two Companies - SFSF and RNOW - Why would anyone compare SAP-SuccessFactors deal with Oracle-RightNow deal?

First and foremost, a masterstroke from SAP, I generally don't say that but this is a very smart and timely move. Read my other blog on why this a solid grab by SAP here

Facts:

SAP is proposing to pay $3.4 B to acquire SuccessFactors(SFSF), a multiple of 10.2 on expected 2011 revenue of $332M.
Oracle paid $1.4B to acquire RightNow (RNOW), a multiple of 6.2 on expected 2011 revenue of $226M.

Since Saturday, every other person is commenting that SAP overpaid including this article in WSJ.

Now what my friends in other circuits don't do is to double click on the deal itself which I did in my previous blog on the business rationale. In this blog, I will use a set of visuals to illustrate that SFSF is a far superior pick on financials. Let's start and discuss tale of two companies:

Tale of Two Companies: SFSF is a better revenue story with CAGR more than DOUBLE than that of RNOW:

SFSF is a far better growth story than RNOW:

SFSF has far better cost structure than RNOW even though SFSF has grown revenues more than TWICE as fast:

And my last point – SFSF has better operating structure and is rapidly becoming more efficient with every dollar it spends on its operating cost:

Both the growth in revenue and 15m subscriber base across the globe has come at a cost in net income but it is very quickly turning around:

I hope that my friends can withdraw their criticism because both qualitatively and quantitatively this is an astute move from SAP. Making money from cloud apps has been tough but this is very quickly starting to change. As always, time will tell who read this right!