Editor’s Note: The ecosystem of big data analytics, and its intersection with mobile networks and cloud computing has increasing relevance to wireless in areas that include service assurance, customer experience management, mobile marketing, location-based services and more. Here is a look at the week’s news in this space.
—Big data analytics company Teradata made its third big-data-related acquisition in six weeks, announcing it has purchased Silicon Valley-based Think Big Analytics. Think Big focuses on Hadoop and consulting services for helping companies implement big data initiatives.
Mike Koehler, president and CEO of Teradata, said all of the acquisitions “are key to achieving our goal of being the leader in enabling customers to derive maximum value from all their data. Think Big’s consulting expertise enhances Teradata’s capability to advise customers on the best way to leverage diverse, open source big data technologies to grow their business.”
In addition to its expertise in big data implementations, Think Big also offers a set of analytics application components for customer and clickstream use, distributed device data management, and risk and trading analytics. The company is based in Mountain View, California.
Teradata said terms of the deal were “not material” to the company and therefore were not disclosed.
—A recent report from Frost & Sullivan sees both big data and the “Internet of Things” as enabling technologies for smarter, more energy-efficient buildings. The convergence of IoT/communication between smart devices, cloud computing, big data and analytics is expected to drive smart-building development.
“Big data, especially, will emerge as a more valuable delivery model owing to affordable upfront costs and lower resource usage,” said Anirudh Bhaskaran, energy and environmental research analyst for Frost & Sullivan. Big data also will serve as a platform for integrating information from multiple systems.
“Local government focus on technology, policy, economy and infrastructure will lend further momentum to smart building initiatives and, gradually, lead to their evolution into smart cities in the next 10 to 15 years,” said Bhaskaran. “The BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — are likely to invest strongly in smart buildings and smart cities due to expanding population, economic growth and rapid urbanization.”
—Cloud-based file distribution toolkit company Content Raven, which focuses on content control, security and analytics for files, has added a marketing tool — Marketing Raven — to its product line. The analytics tool provides detailed tracking data and real-time alerts on engagement activity, according to the company, allowing customers to customize campaigns based on information such as how users engaged with a document, how many times they viewed it, and on what type of device.
Marketing Raven also offers plug-in APIs for integration with platforms such as WordPress, Salesforce and Hubspot. It can be used to add tracking and analytics to file types including documents, video and audio, e-books and white papers, HTML files and others.
“As enterprises look to streamline and refine their customer and sales lifecycles, improved analytics data is key to customizing marketing campaigns for the right prospects,” said Garrett Bekker, senior analyst at 451 Research. “Next-generation digital marketing technology is driving this shift and enabling closer integration between marketing and sales in order to drive more revenue.”
—Nice Systems’ Interaction Analytics solution for customer interactions won a Speech Technology Excellence Award from TIM Customer Magazine. The Nice Interaction Analytics solution is supported by Nice’s Engage Platform for real-time analytics and insights for customer care agents, detecting keywords and phrases in customer interactions in order to make customer care more efficient.
Nice Systems has worked with companies across many industries, including Sprint. A recent report predicts the Natural Language Processing (NLP) marketing, which includes speech and text analytics, to grow from $3.8 billion in 2013 to $9.85 billion in 2018, driven by the demand for a better customer experience, the adoption of smartphones and growth in machine-to-machine technology, and the ability to leverage big data.
