Big Data - CRM by another name...?

The IT revolution has gathered steam with predictive data analytics (of  known customer data) catalyzing  enterprise fortune.  In came CRM with a lot of noise and indeed it was noise and not much.  People got frustrated as most marketing campaigns based on abstract data analytics misguided product launches and promotions religiously backfired, delivering lemons on their balance sheets. Company management lost interest besides money and CRM had its obituary written, for no fault of its own because it was the excessive expectation to blame. Not the concept itself because customer data is always valuable.

This is exactly what is being nicely clarified by Peter Fader, Professor at Wharton Business School while he says "There is a "data fetish" with every new trackable technology, from e-mail and Web browsing in the '90s all the way through mobile communications and geolocation services today. Too many people think that mobile is a "whole new world," offering stunning insights into behaviors that were inconceivable before. But many of the basic patterns are surprisingly consistent across these platforms. That doesn't make them uninteresting or unimportant. But the basic methods we can use in the mobile world to understand and forecast these behaviors (and thus the key data needed to accomplish these tasks) are not nearly as radical as many people suspect."

Superb elucidation... Hats off to Prof. Fader...!

The merger effect

In the software industry, M&A are known to the fastest way to ramp up customer & product stack portfolio. It occasionally creates shareholder value too, though not guaranteed. But hardly does anyone concern how the customer sees it. Agreed, making predictions is a tricky business to begin with. But in the case of the business intelligence (BI) market, recent consolidation has made the task even more difficult than usual and left industry experts largely at odds.

Within the last year, Oracle has acquired Hyperion, SAP acquired Business Objects and IBM acquired Cognos. The only agreement is that until "mega-vendors" SAP, IBM and Oracle announce integration strategies for their recently acquired BI technologies -- expected to happen sometime in the next six to 12 months -- customers have little more to rely on than their wits when making BI buying decisions. Even then, the only sure bet is that they will have to make some difficult choices. The toughest decisions will fall to customers of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion, whose IT infrastructures are not based on the technology of the acquiring vendor -- SAP, IBM and Oracle, respectively.

Exactly why I say it makes sense for open source BI companies like Pentaho to come up with expansion plans to take on the significant consolidation in the estimated $6.25 billion business intelligence industry. Hopefully, it will tempt the big enterprise players not to raise prices for upgrades and maintenance.

But then in their post-merger avatars, will they remain the darling of SMB’s…? What do you think…?

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