Big Data Gets Big Money for Big Reasons

Companies have been throwing money hand over fist into the predictive analytics, data management and business intelligence world over the last few weeks. And while it would be easy to toss all of these under the "Big Data" umbrella, it's more interesting to look at these deals in light of the challenges that each will solve.

Let's take a quick look at five transactions: $225 million total to Birst, Health Catalyst, Localytics and Ayasdi as well as Apple's recent acquisition of FoundationDB.

Looking at these deals helps show existing analytic and data challenges and where new competitors are coming into the market to partner with and challenge traditional players like Oracle, Teradata, IBM, SAP and Microsoft.

Birst: The Need for Two-Tier Business Intelligence

Birst raised $65 million to support the concept of two-tier business intelligence (BI) on March 17. Business intelligence has been around for decades and smart companies have already made significant investments in BI tools such as Hyperion or Cognos.


However, despite these big investments and the concerted efforts of data analysts, IT managers and executives, companies still struggle to grow enterprise BI adoption past the first 20 percent of their employee base.

Birst seeks to change this by creating an infrastructure that supports individual business users. It does this through a combination of a cloud-based platform that supports governed and shared data and a self-service experience for actual users.
 
This creates a cloud-based "fabric" that brings in legacy data that may have to stay in its existing environment for political reasons or because the company has been trained to use legacy tools. By combining this older data with newer user tools and greater flexibility, Birst seeks to open up business intelligence to the rest of the enterprise in a cost-effective and IT-trusted manner.

This is a more realistic approach than expecting companies to toss out a Microsoft or Oracle in a wholesale manner. While businesses may still view large vendors as mission-critical for specific tasks, this still leaves a lot of business intelligence gaps in the environment.

The $65 million will help Birst educate the enterprise world on how to fill these considerable gaps and bring the traditional MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle) world with the new demands of data-driven business decisions.

Health Catalyst: Data-Driven Healthcare Optimization

On March 17, Health Catalyst raised $70 million to support its goal of optimizing healthcare environments. Health Catalyst started as a healthcare data warehousing organization focused on gaining financial and clinical benefits through solutions that consolidate data across healthcare organizations.

Health Catalyst has also developed an analytics application platform that provides apps to improve health care outcomes. This is an interesting evolution of the "appified" world often associated with Apple, Google and the world of mobile apps.

By bringing this flexibility to the healthcare world and potentially allowing these organizations to quickly implement valuable applications into their data environment, Health Catalyst has an opportunity to drive new innovations and visibility in healthcare.

This funding round is expected to push Health Catalyst towards a future IPO as a publicly traded organization.

Localytics: Predictive Analytics More Personal

Localytics raised $35 million on March 24 to support web and mobile application marketing analytics.

The key here is for Localytics to develop predictive analytics that help mobile application developers maintain user loyalty and deliver personalized experiences. Mobile experience today depends on creating apps that are flexible enough to support users on an individualized basis and provide enhancements, recommendations or corrections in real time based on the user's preferences.

This real time and predictive use of analytics combines mobile, analytic and cloud technologies to focus directly on helping one person at a specific time to complete the most important priority at that moment.

Companies continue to improve user interfaces, enhance the usefulness of their own offerings, upsell new services, and reduce churn to create better experiences. To deliver these experiences, companies need to embrace predictive and big data capabilities to help build extremely personalized profiles for each user and each transaction.

Localytics' latest $35 million dollar round suggests the immediate opportunity of making better mobile experiences.

Ayasdi: Calculates Interaction Analytics and Topological Data for the Masses

On March 25, Ayasdi raised $55 million for topological data analysis.

For those not mathematically inclined, what this means is that Ayasdi has strong capabilities to support networked sets of data with multiple internal relationships and also find patterns in what can look like a jumbled visualization. Healthcare providers have used Ayasdi to find correlations in breast cancer tumors and understand potential tracks for healthcare delivery.

Credit:  Cmswire.com