By Ramon Nuñez, LiveHive founder and CEO
Whether you describe it as big data, business intelligence, or data mining, analytics is the hottest trend for 2015—and startups are leading the charge.
Take a look at the companies launching analytics solutions. Take a look at companies acquiring analytics companies, and the analytics companies being acquired. The overwhelming majority are startups. And there are a lot. AngelList catalogs 2,740 analytics startups.
Why Startups Are In the Driver’s Seat for Analytics
While larger companies, such as IBM, are innovating in analytics, they simply can’t match a startup’s pace of innovation. Startups have greater agility, so they can push the envelope faster and with greater depth.
Startups can more readily adopt the very technologies that they are creating and, in doing so, gain competitive advantage. Startups can also start fresh—without the need to integrate within existing legacy systems, accelerating their ability to innovate even further.
As a result, big companies have turned toward analytics startups to advance their own business goals without having to develop the technologies themselves. Recent acquisitions, such as Target’s acquisition of Powered Analytics, Salesforce’s recent acquisition of RelateIQ (as well as EdgeSpring last year), or Twitter’s acquisition of MADBITS, will continue in 2015. Bigger companies will make the purchases that they need to stay in step with the analytics boom.
The Biggest 2015 Analytics Trends Will Center On the Following:
Social analytics
With one-in-four people worldwide, or 63 percent of Internet users, visiting social networks regularly (according to eMarketer Worldwide), social analytics will be essential for businesses to respond quickly to customer interests. Social analytics will deliver the insight to quickly spot trends, identify opportunities for new products and services, and enable businesses to engage more successfully with customers.
Real-time analytics
In our always-connected lives, analytics solutions that can capture behaviors as they happen in real-time will have the advantage. Stale analytics don’t deliver value. If an analytics solution is collecting and reacting to human behaviors—whether it concerns a person’s geographic location, interest in a particular service or product, or a need for immediate assistance of any kind—it must be able to deliver actionable insights in real-time.
Actionable analytics
The biggest winners in analytics will have the ability to not only quickly amass and make sense of huge volumes of data, but also deliver it for actionable value. Actionable analytics solve existing problems and perform intuitively for faster and widespread adoption. Actionable analytics effectively serve a target market—without adding complexity or making more work.
Startups are clearly playing a key role in the analytics revolution. That role will only grow in importance in 2015 and beyond, as analytics technologies become more capable and more predictive. Tomorrow’s startups will undoubtedly innovate analytics to dramatically increase the speed in which we solve problems or react to customer needs. Predictive analytics will enable professionals to be more proactive, such as healthcare professionals treating and preventing health problems before symptoms even appear, or businesses anticipating customer needs before customers even realize the needs themselves.
Analytics technologies are transforming our world in every aspect of our lives, and startups are leading the charge.
