IBM Acquires Web-Analytics, SAP Ahead of the Game?
Boris Evelson pointed to IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics, a web-analytics vendor, here. A commenter added that SAP has had web-analytics integration for some time.
Boris is quick to point out that integration of web-analytics into any vendor’s business intelligence stack is bound to be a great competitive differentiator. I’m not quite sure I agree. The best Business Intelligence and data warehousing solutions should be flexible enough to pull information in from any data source. Indeed, they often allow you to use pre-built content add-ons and ETL routines to connect to common data sources like ERP, CRM, manufacturing systems, logistics, and so on, ad infinitum, etc.. Adding web-analytics seems to be a drop in the bucket.
The question is what do you want to achieve with your BI solution. If the contribution of your company’s web-presence is important to the need for BI, then web-analytics will be important.
It can be important to tie web metrics to other information, top-line and bottom-line results. Can you identify how much of your sales revenue came in through your website, web-sales contribution to bad debt, and employee use of social media vs achievement of targets. If it’s not important to you to answer these questions, then a web-analytics point solution can stand alone to give you information about impressions, clicks, etc. If it is important to answer these questions, then you can either tie the output of a web-analytics package into your data, or you can grab data directly from web services. Either way, there’s work to do.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
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There are 2 Comments to "IBM Acquires Web-Analytics, SAP Ahead of the Game?"
SAP & web analytic integration is it the new concept?
Hi Seozest. I’ve been away so I’m sorry I am slow to respond here. No, SAP and web analytics integration is not a new concept. I just don’t want anyone to choose a Business Intelligence toolset based on its ability to integrate web analytics. It’s more important to consider how these analytics will be used.
Great comments by John Schwarz on this here. Excerpt: “Customers already do that today with let’s say Neilsen data, or IRI data. But these analyses are not real time, and they are only available in massively undifferentiated databases. We’ve got to bring tools to the customer that allow them to take their product marketing strategies and the retail response to those marketing strategies and make those available real time so that the analysis can be done instantly and that the customer can iterate and do some predictive work on the information that they have. We already have applications that are in the marketplace that do that and we need to see more of them.”