New breed of analytics software, a potential growth area

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 17 June 2003, 19:30 IST
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MENLO PARK, CA: Garage Technology Ventures sees the new breed of analytics software as a growth area ripe with opportunity for startups. Business Performance Management, Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence are just a few of the buzz-terms emerging in this rapidly evolving enterprise software category. "Economic pressures, increased operational complexity and new corporate governance requirements have only served to exacerbate the growing need for new, more agile, more powerful solutions," explained Anita Rao, vice president of Enterprise Software at Garage Technology Ventures. "Despite the current softness in IT spending, we see a significant increase in the deployment of analytics software across virtually all industries. It's not enough to be networked, integrated and automated. The goal is to be the Intelligent Enterprise." Last week, Garage Technology Ventures hosted experts in the field at the Quadrus Conference Center to offer investors and entrepreneurs a discussion about the trends and opportunities for the new generation of technology and tools that extract knowledge from data. "The last twenty-five years of analytics are the baseline for where new innovation will drive the application of analytics for the intelligent enterprise," commented Mark Smith CEO & SVP of Research for Ventana Research. "The next wave of software for managing performance of an organization is strongly based on applying analytics and collaboration to information." Smith joined a panel of experts, comprised of Ajay Birla, VP & CIO, Solectron, Technology Solutions Business Unit; Bill Gaylord, VP Market Development, Hyperion; Brian Gentile, EVP and CMO, Brio Software and Ivan Chong, VP Product Management, Informatica. Echoing Smith, panelists concurred that collaboration tools would be the logical next step to help them better develop, visualize and analyze data. In addition, the panel provided perspective on several areas ripe for new solutions that, in turn, may present opportunities for new players. Speaking from the customers' perspective, Solectron's Birla noted that while a lot of emphasis is placed on real-time solutions, it remains "a nice to have." He also suggested that vendors pay attention to the problems that enterprise customers have today and look to solve those problems with technology -- rather than trying to sell technology and make it fit into their problem. There were presentations by Subhash Chowdhury, CEO, Aankhen and Chandran Sankaran, President and CEO, Closedloop Solutions.