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.)

From the World of Business Analytics - Miscellaneous Posting

• Business Analytics landscape is changing - CORDA was acquired
Former Omniture CEO Unveils A-List Investors – Acquires Corda (A dashboard company) http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/05/19/former-omniture-ceo-unveils-a-list-investors/
http://www.corda.com/


• On Demand Predictive Analytics: In2clouds - http://www.in2clouds.com/

• 40 BA Vendors We're Watching in 2011 (All eyes on the agile vendors that gained customer traction in the rebound)
http://www.information-management.com/issues/21_2/40-vendors-were-watching-in-2011-10019878-1.html?zkPrintable=true (Source: Information Management Magazine, 03/01/2011)

Upcoming Post - Intelligence On Demand or Analytics On Demand

Here are some of my favs in no particular order -

1. PivotLink - http://www.pivotlink.com/
2. SpatialKey - http://www.spatialkey.com/
3. GoodData - http://www.gooddata.com/
4. SAP - http://www.ondemand.com/businessintelligence
5. Birst - http://www.birst.com/

I will check in later to talk about this segment which no single company has been able to crack (solve) yet. Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

Predictive Analytics to the Rescue and Beyond! Predictive Analytics to go pervasive!

This segment of the analytics will explode soon. I have never made a prediction but if I were to make one - this will be it. Predictive Analytics have been the thing of super smart, masters of finance or PHD in statistics and/or mathematicians in an organization, not generally IT. This will soon change just like everything else has changed around us with consumerization of IT. Companies like SAS, SPSS (IBM) and bunch of other smaller niche companies offer predictive solutions to companies to make future decisions by analyzing the patterns in the data (all of the statistics: mean, variance, confidence-intervals, distribution, monte-carlo, seasonality, decision trees etc.)

Here are some anecdotal use-cases from the real would on how predictive is helping companies become smarter and more profitable:

 "Some of the most famous examples of analytics in action come from the world of professional sports, where 'quants' increasingly make the decisions about what players are really worth. Consider these examples from the business world:


--Best Buy was able to determine through analysis of member data that 7% of its customers were responsible for 43% of its sales. The company then segmented its customers into several archetypes and redesigned stores and the in-store experience to reflect the buying habits of particular customer groups.


--Olive Garden uses data to forecast staffing needs and food preparation requirements down to individual menu items and ingredients. The restaurant chain has been able to manage its staff much more efficiently and has cut food waste significantly.


--The U.K.'s Royal Shakespeare Co. used analytics to look at its audience members' names, addresses, performances attended and prices paid for tickets over a period of seven years. The theater company then developed a marketing program that increased regular attendees by more than 70% and its membership by 40%."


Source : Forbes: Why Predictive Analytics Is A Game-Changer?

As always, more on this later.. My approach will be to introduce each topic in the Analytics and then go deeper as the opportunity arise. I want to bring more use-cases in future blogs...

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)

A crowded Mobile Analytics (Mobile BI) Competitive Landscape - Is the opportunity really that big?

Quite a few challengers in the market. The following list is a just a first stab at the number of companies looking to capture a piece of the action. The Mobile Analytics market is going to be a big opportunity which also nicely ties into the Big Data story and the Enterprise Mobility trend. More on the size of the opportunity and mobile analytics trends later. For now enjoy this graphics I built using the Dresner study -

Also see the magic quadrant from Gartner on BI. Some overlap between the companies on the two graphics indicating that there are new challengers on the market like LogiXML and Bitam. See my earlier blog on HTML 5 on LogiXML - 

Fast Emerging, Developing and Developed Trends in Business Intelligence (BI)

1. Emerging - Social and Collaborative
2. Developing - Location Analytics (Augmented Reality for Mobile Devices)
3. Developed - Mobile

Facilitators:
- Huge amount of investment in collaborative software to optimize performance
- One obvious one - explosion in Mobile device and heterogeneous devices are accepted in the organization
- Strong desire to tie the analytics to its source, where did the event happen - zero in on the location. 

I get to live, rationalize, strategize, visualize, evangelize and everything else to influence build real BI solutions.
More on this in my follow up blogs, for now, enjoy following excerpts from a Gartner report -
....
Within two years, 15% of BI deployments will combine collaborative and social decision making-environments.
....
With the rapid development of handheld functionality and mass adoption rates across enterprises, by 2014 33% of business intelligence will be through mobile devices. 
....
Source: Gartner Predicts Business Intelligence Will Go Mobile and Social