Hummer Winblad Venture Partners is bullish on analytics. Hummer Winblad started in 1989 as the first firm to focus exclusively on software investing. The company has made 125 early-stage software investments and has had 55 exits to date, many with outcomes eventually over $1 billion in value. Software was a small investment area in 1989, but today, it receives about 35 percent of all venture capital dollars and more than 40 percent of the investments. Hummer Winblad rides waves and invests in disruptions. Its first fund leveraged the start of the client-server wave. Today, in its sixth fund, the firm’s investments cover three intersecting circles—social, mobile and cloud. The intersection of all of these growing market opportunities has been the value of the data and its assessment through analytics. If software is the core DNA of most technology advances today, analytics is the core DNA of software companies. Hummer Winblad’s two largest successes to date have been in analytics—Arbor Software and Omniture. Today, Hummer Winblad sits on the boards of eight private analytics companies and continues to see new innovative analytics startups every week. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at the top 10 drivers Mark Gorenberg, managing director of Hummer Winblad, said are behind the growth in demand for analytics software.
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Data Explosion
There are more than 1.8 billion people on the Internet with 4.6 billion mobile phones. By 2020, there will be 50 billion connected devices, all producing data. Last year, 1,200 exabytes of data were created, and it’s doubling every 14 months. Every company will have a big data strategy and deploy some form of analytics.
New Software, Hardware Architectures
No SQl , New SQL and flash memory. This is the first significant challenge to SQL dominance in 30 years, and it will make databases a growth area again. Hadoop is emerging as a leader in No SQl databases. MapReduce is one of the new techniques for analyzing non-transaction optimized databases.
Real-Time Analysis
To be current and even predictive, data has to be assessed in real time. By 2008, Omniture was already analyzing more than 1 trillion transactions per quarter running on a real-time network of about 20,000 open-source-based servers. Large retailers were running 10- to 15-minute campaigns, side by side with different sites, to determine which created the best results to use in campaigns. It was a concept unavailable even a couple of years before.
The Adaptive Web
The adaptive Web is the next generation of targeting. Wisdom of the crowds is used to help create sites for each individual customer. Clicks, conversions and engagements are being trumped by packages that can understand the intent of those engagements. Baynote is a company that observes engagement patterns among like-minded individuals to understand user intent to automatically adapt the online experience to the individual. Baynote’s slogan is “Stop analyzing. Start adapting.”
Verticals and Specialization
Verticals and specialization are fostering new algorithm development for analytics. IBM in 2009 bought SPSS and announced a new vertical strategy for analytics. Algorithms and techniques increase their value in vertical domains. SignalDemand has improved predictive analytics for commodity businesses, and matches supply- and demand-side data to guide their customers to better pricing and product mixes. Star Analytics, another Hummer Winblad company, focuses on financial services and automates both the workflow and integration of all the other business-intelligence products to create an enterprise financial picture.
Social Marketing
Social marketing is letting companies run campaigns that include social sites. The best influencers can greatly expand the qualified prospect list and increase the funnel mid-campaign. Measuring return on investment is key. Crowd Factory quantifies the value of social media by connecting social activity to conversion events.
Going Beyond the Web
Media areas beyond the Web applications are improving their effectiveness with analytics. AceMetrix delivers on-demand television advertising analytics. The company has patents pending that measure the creative effectiveness of in-market TV advertising and lets them benchmark against existing ads from competitors. Hummer Winblad’s latest investment, Kiip, combines analytics and targeted rewards to increase game use.
Real-Time Dashboards
Hummer Winblad is seeing new companies that gather real-time data from around the organization and simplify it to create easily customizable simple-to-read dashboards that executives can monitor in real time.
Visualization
Deloitte sees visualization as the top tech trend of 2011, according to Hummer Winblad. Visualizations are growing at a pace reminiscent of the early days of online video. There were 10 million viewers of visualizations in 2010, Hummer Winblad said. That is expected to grow to 40 million by next year. Publishers post eight infographics a week now, compared with two days a week last year.
Unstructured Data
Understanding and quantifying unstructured data is important. Hummer Winblad is seeing more companies proposing algorithms to discover intelligence in unstructured content and analyze it to understand sentiment from emails to articles to analyst reports. IBM’s Watson is the new gold standard in contextual analysis.
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Hummer Winblad Venture Partners is bullish on analytics. Hummer Winblad started in 1989 as the first firm to focus exclusively on software investing. The company has made 125 early-stage software investments and has had 55 exits to date, many with outcomes eventually over $1 billion in value. Software was a small investment area in 1989, but today, it receives about 35 percent of all venture capital dollars and more than 40 percent of the investments. Hummer Winblad rides waves and invests in disruptions. Its first fund leveraged the start of the client-server wave. Today, in its sixth fund, the firm’s investments cover three intersecting circles—social, mobile and cloud. The intersection of all of these growing market opportunities has been the value of the data and its assessment through analytics. If software is the core DNA of most technology advances today, analytics is the core DNA of software companies. Hummer Winblad’s two largest successes to date have been in analytics—Arbor Software and Omniture. Today, Hummer Winblad sits on the boards of eight private analytics companies and continues to see new innovative analytics startups every week. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at the top 10 drivers Mark Gorenberg, managing director of Hummer Winblad, said are behind the growth in demand for analytics software.