
Improving Corporate Planning through Insight Generation
I want to take a quick breather from writing about corporate innovation and return to another topic of this blog: big data and insight as a service. Host Analytics, one of my portfolio companies, recently completed a $25M financing round. Host Analytics offers a cloud-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Suite that streamlines a corporation’s planning, […]

IBM-Apple Deal: Mobile Enterprise Applications
On July 15 IBM and Apple announced an exclusive partnership. There are several components to this partnership that have been addressed elsewhere (here and here) but of most interest was the commitment to develop 100 industry-specific mobile analytic applications. As I had written, the broad adoption of smartphones and tablets by employees, customers and partners, […]

Insight Generation
In my last blog I tried to define the concept of insight. In this post I discuss insight generation. Insights are generated by systematically and exhaustively examining a) the output of various analytic models (including predictive, benchmarking, outlier-detection models, etc.) generated from a body of data, and b) the content and structure of the models themselves. Insight generation […]

Defining Insight
A little over two years ago I wrote a series of blogs introducing Insight-as-a-Service. My idea on how companies can provide insight as a service started by observing my SaaS portfolio companies. In addition to each customer’s operational data used by their SaaS applications, like all SaaS companies, these companies collect and store application usage data. As […]

Analyzing Social Analytics
Social (media, technologies, applications) continues to penetrate the corporate world. To date the penetration has primarily been driven by the demand to take advantage of Facebook’s massive reach and enable companies to get closer to their customers. More recently, companies started taking similar advantage of Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. The quick adoption of social by […]

Insight as a Service (Part 3)
A few days ago I presented a webinar on Insight as a Service. In the presentation I tried to provide further details on the concept which I first introduced here and later elaborated here. I am including the webinar presentation (click on the slide below) and the notes because they elaborate further on Insight as a Service and provide some examples.

Insight as a Service (Part 2)
Over a year ago, I introduced the concept of Insight as a Service and described some of the issues that will need to be addressed for such services to be possible. Insight as a Service refers to action-oriented, analytic-driven solutions that operate on data generated by SaaS applications, proprietary corporate data, as well as syndicated […]

SaaS Growth, Dogfood, and Images :-)
Fellow Enterprise Irregular Evangelos Simoudis is definitely worth following. As an active Venture Capitalist he often focuses on his portfolio experience – but through that micro-lense gives us an overview of the market, “The State of SaaS” per se, confirming / contradicting based on real life, real companies what many of us see as trends. […]

Insight as a Service
The survey data presented in last August’s Pacific Crest SaaS workshop pointed to the need for a variety of data analytic services. These services that can be offered under, Insight-as-a-Service, can range from business benchmarking, e.g., compare one business to its peers’ that are also customers of the same SaaS vendor, to business process improvement recommendations based on a SaaS application’s usage, e.g., reduce the amount spent on search keywords by using the SEM application’s keyword optimization module, to improving business practices by integrating syndicated data with a client’s own data, e.g., reduce the response time to customer service requests…