Yesterday Salesforce completed its acquisition of RelateIQ, a startup that combines CRM and data science to get the right messages to the right person at the right time. The sales price was $392,133,512 -- not bad for a company that was founded three years ago.
While much was reported when the sale was first announced, little has been said as to what happens next, other than Salesforce gaining improved big data, data science and analytic capabilities.
Yesterday VentureBeat wrote, without identifying its source, that Salesforce would create an R&D division, Salesforce X, where RelateIQ’s data scientists would work.
Not a bad idea considering that RelateIQ’s Chief Technology officer, DJ Patil, was named one of the 7 most powerful data scientists in the world by Forbes magazine, and is credited (along with Jeff Hammerbacher) to have coined the term “data scientist”.
Patil’s team members aren’t slackers either. Rusian Belkin, Twitter’s former VP Engineering, Search and Content, leads Engineering at RealateIQ. And then there’s Daniel Francisco, Relate IQ’s Manager of Product, he was Chief of Staff and Product Manager at Linkedin.
Even if the Salesforce X rumor is wrong, it’s a good idea. So how about it, Mr. Benioff? You have one of the best data teams in the world working for you and chances are good that they’re more into doing interesting work than money. The latter of which they probably have plenty of because all of the successful startups they’ve worked at.
Splunk Changes IT with its App for Stream and the Cloud
Many of us see big data insights and analytics as tools that can be used to figure out which ads should be posted on the websites we visit, to help us discover new LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and so on.
But some of the biggest uses of big data and analytics aren’t consumer facing at all. Instead they monitor computer hardware, network performance and to discover hacker attacks.
Splunk is one of the leaders in helping the Enterprise and smaller businesses to get this kind of work done. After all, companies are becoming increasingly network dependent and if there’s a major network failure or hacker attack, you’re out of business.
Yesterday Splunk announced the Splunk App for Stream, which enables the capture of real-time streaming wire data—strengthening operational insights for security, IT and the business. For those of us unfamiliar with the term “wire data”, it’s the machine data transmitted between applications over the network. Now with Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud deployments, Splunk customers can analyze wire data and correlate it with machine-generated data.
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What’s the big deal? Data driven insights like this haven’t been available, with such little hassle, before now. The Splunk App for Stream can help IT to quickly discover why an application is running too slow and where the bottleneck is; monitor and provide real time correlation to drive sophisticated analytics on breaches, threat detection, intelligence gathering and threat prevention; and to capture web interactions and key metrics such as time spent on page, bounce rates, navigation paths and product performance, without needing to tag individual pages. At the end of the day, insights like these improve customer satisfaction and conversions, prevent drop-offs and even boost online revenues.
Logi Analytics Brings Logi Vision to HP Vertica
HP is going big on the big data/analytics game and they’re doing so as much via partners as by their own internal efforts. Last month we wrote about how Hadoop-maker Hortonworks is playing a big role in HAVEn. Now Logi Analytics is introducing its data discovery tool Logi Vision to Vertica users. It was designed to empower every person in an organization to analyze, visualize and socialize insights culled from some of the largest data sets in the world.
Now while we’re always skeptical about whether anyone actually has a tool that will allow “every person” in an organization to glean insights from big data, Logi Vision does do a lot of the heavy lifting for people who are skilled at working with data.
SAS Gets Cloudier
One of the biggest criticisms SAS gets is that it’s an old technology and hard to work with, especially where big data and Hadoop projects are concerned. But no one ever seems to complain about its ability to crunch numbers and produce amazingly accurate results.
So SAS has taken to building on-ramps of sorts by making its products available on the Cloud. Earlier this week SAS made its SAS Visual Analytics available on AWS. Its SAS Data Management, SAS Business Intelligence have been available on Amazon Web Services for some time.
What’s the big win? Aside from not needing to bother with all of the expense and non-value adding activities that setting up infrastructure often demands, there’s scalability and the ability to analyze data from anywhere at any time. But that’s not all. The SAS + AWS partnership should allow more organizations to take advantage of the services because of cloud pricing models and skill sets required.
