Portability in a Hybrid Data Ecosystem

Adoption of the Hybrid Data Ecosystem continues to grow. Vendors are working to deliver highly integrated ecosystems with platforms that provide the user an agile and flexible array of solutions to address today's complex and demanding workloads. The interesting part of the story is the division in how they approach this opportunity. Some vendors are building fully featured "Walled Garden" style solutions with all parts dependent upon one another. Its a nice strategy that may lead to better inetegration but you can't really get away from it once you are engaged. This type of lock-in to technology and infrastruture can be dangerous and in the long run very expensive for the consumer.

Others (only a few) are focusing on highly integrated environments that match the competition feature for feature but at the same time allow for portability. Pivotal is a company working to bring its clients portability with cloud infrastructure. A common fear of cloud adaptors is being locked into one infrastructure provider for the duration of their projects or forever. If you utilize Pivotal on its Cloud Foundry platform you have the ability to move from AWS to Rackspace if need be providing a level of flexibility that most companies would prefer over time. This strategy is also smart for companies that suspect a Cloud based program may migrate back behind the firewall at some point. Being locked-in to a Cloud provider will make this an impossible change or at the least terribly expensive.

So this begs the question, what's better? Walled gardens or portable infrastructure. The answer seems obvious to me but I'm interested to hear from you on this topic.

Push Intelligence

I'm not generally a big fan of new industry acronyms or buzz words. But I have to say I like the term Push Intelligence. It characterizes the value proposition of these type of solutions pretty well.

A leader in this space is Metric Insights. They deliver a platform that starts on the alert end of BI instead of the hunt and search side that many solutions employ. The environment is Key Performance Indicator (KPI) oriented, pushing dashboards and reports to the end user that require attention and skipping the ones that don't. The platform goes a step further in that it offers collaborative features that allow stakeholders to annotate charts to add greater context to the data presented. 

Metric Insights is architected to make embedding easy so companies who need sophisticated alerting and collaborative features can add the solution to their BI strategy. The solution is value priced and integrates well with 100's of data sources including Hadoop. MongoDB and Cassandra.

The Intersection of Business Intelligence and Social CRM

This past week analysts at the Altimeter Group released their study titled "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management" The study outlines 18 use cases for putting the customer first and the technologies that you need to get that job done. Authors R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang did a great job creating what will become the play book for social media integration in the enterprise. In the report they discuss the 5M's of Social CRM as a framework to guide your processes and strategy as you integrate Social CRM into the seven key categories (Customer Insights, Social Marketing, Social Sales, Social Service and Support, Social innovation, Collaboration and Customer Experience) that connect you to your customers.

 

Enterprise business intelligence tools play a key role in successfully integrating and measuring the unstructured and semi-structured data that drives the social space. SAS, SAP Oracle, Purisma, IBM, DataFlux, Information Builders and others are already addressing the challenges that Social CRM delivers. Its still very early in the adoption process but BI vendors are starting to see the growing opportunity. The interesting thing will be to see who puts a clear end to end offering together first. Monitoring is the popular technology for now but as companies gain better access to the social landscape they will demand integration and measurement. The Social CRM market is moving so fast I can't help but think that the larger slower moving "big stack guys" may be at a disadvantage and susceptible to an innovative upstart. 

Top Trends in Business Intelligence

One of the great things about the TDWI World Conference series is that you get to see your friends every 90 days and for the last year or two Vickie Farrell, Strategic Marketing Manager for HP’s BI Solutions business and I have had a chance to visit and discuss the trends in BI. Vickie and her team do an excellent job surveying business intelligence end users to compile the annual whitepaper titled HP’s Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence a comprehensive look at the industry.

I'll list a couple here but you should follow the link to get the full document.

Trend #10: Growing interest in cloud computing for business intelligence.
Trend #9: Social computing and the next frontier for business intelligence.
Trend #8: Growing importance of integrating and analyzing unstructured/semi-structured data.
Trend #7: Growing impact and opportunity of Complex Event Processing.
Trend #6: Data warehousing and business intelligence: A new generation drives new priorities.

To get the rest follow the link!

Analyzing the voice of the customer (VOC)

First off this isn't an easy task, the amount of unstructured data available in client driven communities is huge not to mention the standard enterprise data we already have that needs to be integrated with this highly valuable source of insight. Attensity Group's suite of applications focus on leveraging actionable data from emails, web forums, surveys, CRM systems, online communities and other sources. Attensity just launched Analyze for VoC Community Advantage. Attensity's VoC solutions convert the text of conversations and feedback into intelligence with dash boarding capabilities that reveal sentiments and trends of your customer or prospect communities.

The Analyze for VOC Community Advantage product is a SaaS hosted solution offering quick setup and fixed monthly costs for the service. Providing insight into customer sentiment, loyalty and satisfaction. The combination of a semantic engine and text analytics allow Attensity to find valuable data where others just see unstructured chatter. Companies in this sector are getting the attention of the front end business intelligence companies as many of them see the addition of this type of market intelligence as critical to their business intelligence offering.

The addition of this type of data to enterprise intelligence can be invaluable and allow companies the insight needed to become less reactive and more right-time in their approach to trends within client communities.

I don't see this type of analysis being adopted by every company that gets value from their BI infrastructure.....just the smart ones.