Big Four and the Battle of Sentiments - Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP

In this battle of sentiments or opinions for the four software giants - Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP, SAP is generating a lot of positive buzz with its message of "innovation without disruption" and leading the pack with a 95% sentiment score.

Tag	TweetsFetched	+ve Tweets	-ve Tweets	Avg.Score	Tweets	Sentiment
@IBM	198	49	45	0.081	94	52%
@Microsoft	893	307	78	0.484	385	80%
@Oracle	297	90	17	0.313	107	84%
@SAP	98	55	3	0.673	58	95%

Few days ago, I published this blog "Updated Sentiment Analysis and a Word Cloud for Netflix" and the underlying R code.  I used the same R program to compare the sentiments for the four software giants.  Now, technically speaking, IBM and Oracle are not pure software companies anymore since they both package hardware (server and storage hardware) along with the software but the rivalry between these four companies persuaded me to put a comparative analysis  here.  I originally included HP in this analysis but then dropped it as I didn't consider HP in the same league as these fours in the software category.

What surprised me the most was the lowest score IBM received, lower than Oracle!  What went wrong here?  I am also surprised to see Oracle occupying the second spot with 84% sentiment score.  So besides all the negative publicity Oracle attracts, the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive.

The one improvement I would like to make to this analysis is to get more tweets.  Twitter API restricts the number of tweets that one can fetch and doesn't allow you to fetch older tweets.  I would love to run this analysis over a year worth of tweets and also show a time series of sentiment score.  That will be fantastic!

Here are the four histograms, one each for four candidates, showing the distribution of opinion scores:

SAP

IBM

Microsoft

Oracle








Happy Analyzing!


The underlying data can be downloaded here.

Business Analytics Market - Ripe for M&A Opportunities?

This is not a recommendation to buy any of the companies I am mentioning here. I am just sharing my opinion on potential M&A opportunity in Business Analytics space. The companies in highlighted rows present could be a target of M&A this year. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Who could buy: HP, IBM and Oracle (or may be Dell) will likely acquire them in 2011.

There may be some mergers between INFA/QLIK or TDC/TBX or TDC/MSTR or MSTR/INFA or INFA/TDC to build a stronger company and to offer complete business analytics solutions. 

Also see my other post on emerging and fast growing companies in Analytics space.

(Disclosure: I don't have any position in any of the companies.)

Fast Emerging, Developing and Developed Trends in Business Intelligence (BI)

1. Emerging - Social and Collaborative
2. Developing - Location Analytics (Augmented Reality for Mobile Devices)
3. Developed - Mobile

Facilitators:
- Huge amount of investment in collaborative software to optimize performance
- One obvious one - explosion in Mobile device and heterogeneous devices are accepted in the organization
- Strong desire to tie the analytics to its source, where did the event happen - zero in on the location. 

I get to live, rationalize, strategize, visualize, evangelize and everything else to influence build real BI solutions.
More on this in my follow up blogs, for now, enjoy following excerpts from a Gartner report -
....
Within two years, 15% of BI deployments will combine collaborative and social decision making-environments.
....
With the rapid development of handheld functionality and mass adoption rates across enterprises, by 2014 33% of business intelligence will be through mobile devices. 
....
Source: Gartner Predicts Business Intelligence Will Go Mobile and Social

IBM - Analytics is a very serious priority! How serious? $14B serious!

Actions speaks louder than words -  

- IBM has pent $14 billion on 24 business intelligence-related acquisitions over the past 5 years** (See the graphics below)

- It has 8,000 consultants in Analytics and Optimization service trained on BI***

- IBM earmarks $20B for acquisition through 2015 * 

Analytics is a priority at IBM for following reasons: 

- that spending on BI is growing twice as fast as information technology spending overall

- that 80% of CEOs see information as the source of competitive advantage. (Source: IBM and MIT Sloan Management Reviews)

Here is a latest press release that further reinforces the market's belief that IBM machine is not slowing down the big-data front - 

IBM Ups Big Data Bet with New Software, $100 Million in Research

http://gigaom.com/2011/05/20/ibm-ups-big-data-bet-with-new-software-100-million-in-research/

Source: *,**,*** Public Press Release (IBM Accelerates Business Intelligence Acquisitions, Jeff Moad, Managing Automations, IBM Analyst Day, 2010)

Big Date Beneficiaries - Sybase, Netezza, Exadata and more!

So my last post was about big data. Let's talk what kind of companies are going to benefit from the data explosion and mind you, the big data opportunity can't be discussed in one single blog. Now, the big data story started in 2010 and there are already few beneficiaries:

• SAP acquired Sybase;
• IBM acquired Netezza; and
• Oracle acquired Exadata.

Going into 2011, the big data story is only going to get bigger. Here is an article that I read earlier (from a series of such articles) that discussed 3 predictions for 2011 based on big data - 3 "Big-Data" Predictions for 2011

Prediction #1: Not all data is created equal. Traditional relational database management systems will be challenged in 2011. (other flavors of repositories including columnar, in-memory, Hadoop/MapReduce, and other NoSQL approaches made popular by Google, Facebook, and other large-scale Internet applications.)

Prediction #2: Cloud architecture deployments will grow, specifically for long-term data storage and retention.

Prediction #3: Enterprises will search for sustainable storage.

Highlights:

data retention and management software will benefit from this trend

Informatica

Teradata