Big Four and the Battle of Sentiments - Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP

In this battle of sentiments or opinions for the four software giants - Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP, SAP is generating a lot of positive buzz with its message of "innovation without disruption" and leading the pack with a 95% sentiment score.

Tag	TweetsFetched	+ve Tweets	-ve Tweets	Avg.Score	Tweets	Sentiment
@IBM	198	49	45	0.081	94	52%
@Microsoft	893	307	78	0.484	385	80%
@Oracle	297	90	17	0.313	107	84%
@SAP	98	55	3	0.673	58	95%

Few days ago, I published this blog "Updated Sentiment Analysis and a Word Cloud for Netflix" and the underlying R code.  I used the same R program to compare the sentiments for the four software giants.  Now, technically speaking, IBM and Oracle are not pure software companies anymore since they both package hardware (server and storage hardware) along with the software but the rivalry between these four companies persuaded me to put a comparative analysis  here.  I originally included HP in this analysis but then dropped it as I didn't consider HP in the same league as these fours in the software category.

What surprised me the most was the lowest score IBM received, lower than Oracle!  What went wrong here?  I am also surprised to see Oracle occupying the second spot with 84% sentiment score.  So besides all the negative publicity Oracle attracts, the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive.

The one improvement I would like to make to this analysis is to get more tweets.  Twitter API restricts the number of tweets that one can fetch and doesn't allow you to fetch older tweets.  I would love to run this analysis over a year worth of tweets and also show a time series of sentiment score.  That will be fantastic!

Here are the four histograms, one each for four candidates, showing the distribution of opinion scores:

SAP

IBM

Microsoft

Oracle








Happy Analyzing!


The underlying data can be downloaded here.

Business Analytics Market - Ripe for M&A Opportunities?

This is not a recommendation to buy any of the companies I am mentioning here. I am just sharing my opinion on potential M&A opportunity in Business Analytics space. The companies in highlighted rows present could be a target of M&A this year. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Who could buy: HP, IBM and Oracle (or may be Dell) will likely acquire them in 2011.

There may be some mergers between INFA/QLIK or TDC/TBX or TDC/MSTR or MSTR/INFA or INFA/TDC to build a stronger company and to offer complete business analytics solutions. 

Also see my other post on emerging and fast growing companies in Analytics space.

(Disclosure: I don't have any position in any of the companies.)

Does your company have a BI implementation plan? Consider this statistics:

• According to market research firm IDC, annual data generation will reach 35 zettabytes or about 35 million petabytes by 2020. 
• That is enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching halfway to Mars, or 17.5 million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States. 
• As a result, business intelligence has become an eight billion dollar industry and continues to increase each year. Global Industry Analysts released a report in July projecting the BI software market will reach $12.4 billion by 2015.
•  In May, Forrester came out with a report on the state of the BI industry, finding 49 percent of companies are planning a BI project in 2010 or soon after.

I think that the BI market is expected to be bigger than what IDC is projecting based on my own experience, analysis, research trends and continuous work with BI think-tanks. There are lot of other trends like location analytics and predictive which will make BI even more pervasive in next 2-3 years. 

Now, this ties pretty neatly into my earlier blogs on Big Data and huge amount of innovation happening in this space. Keep blogging... (See my blog entry from February 2010)