Closed Coremetrics Deal To Provide IBM Customers Smarter Web Metrics

IBM announced today it had closed its acquisition of San Mateo, CA-based Coremetrics, a leader in Web analytics.

This acquisition will extend IBM’s business analytics capabilities by enabling organizations to gain real-time insight into consumer interactions.

It will also enhance IBM’s ability to help businesses rapidly gain intelligence into social networks and online media sources through a cloud-based delivery model, and to use this insight to create smarter, more effective marketing campaigns.

Smart marketers inside IBM are already looking at ways we can leverage this exciting new capability on IBM’s own behalf, and Coremetrics already has over 2,100 customers already leveraging their unique Web analytics capabilities across a wide range of industries.

These industries run the gamut, ranging from retail to financial services to media and publishing to travel and hospitality to education.  Current Coremetrics customers include companies like Holiday Inn, PETCO, 1-800 Flowers, Office Depot, Victoria’s Secret, and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

Coremetrics: Providing Real-Time Social Media Intelligence

Coremetrics offerings can provide real time intelligence on what consumers are saying about the products and services being offered to them and allow clients to make fact-based, accurate decisions on marketing expenditures. As a result, marketing teams can gain deeper insight about their consumers and present personalized recommendations, promotions and other sales incentives across a variety of channels where consumers interact with their brands. These channels span traditional outlets such as storefronts and catalogs and newer outlets including all forms of eCommerce and social media.

Coremetrics offerings are a new addition to IBM’s business analytics portfolio, with the web analytics capabilities clients need to help understand the shopping habits, likes and dislikes of their customers.

In addition, Coremetrics’ software complements IBM’s existing software and services portfolio of offerings from WebSphere, information management and business analytics and optimization.

Coremetrics’ capabilities will help businesses empower their marketing professionals to automate and optimize their marketing processes and create the greatest possible return on their marketing expenditures.

Consistent with IBM’s software strategy, IBM will continue to support and enhance Coremetrics’ technologies and clients while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio.

Joe Davis, CEO of Coremetrics, had this to say about the closing of the deal: "IBM and Coremetrics can help businesses rapidly gain intelligence into social networks and online media sources through a software as a service (SaaS) delivery model and incorporate this insight into their business processes to create smarter, more effective marketing campaigns.”

"Together, we can develop powerful new business analytics solutions, delivering a single source of information about every aspect of your online business — every customer, transaction, product, channel and supplier — to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and drive measurable business results. Further, we deliver on-the-go access to real-time analytics and performance data on all major smart mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android."

Coremetrics: Smarter, Faster Web Marketing Via The Cloud

Since 2006, IBM and Coremetrics have partnered to deliver a leading cross-channel business analytics solution specifically for use with IBM WebSphere Commerce software. 

Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce was designed to provide business managers with a clear view of their web sites, and to automatically create targeted marketing campaigns based on visitor behavior directly within the WebSphere Commerce solution.

Today’s announcement builds on this shared history and positions IBM to expand its analytics strategy, which includes a range of offerings available throughout IBM’s Software Group as well as the IBM Business Analytics and Optimization Consulting organization — a team of 5,000 consultants and a network of analytics solution centers, backed by an overall investment of more than $11 billion in acquisitions in the last five years.

The acquisition builds on a successful collaboration between Coremetrics and IBM around WebSphere Portal products.  Coremetrics will deliver integrated analytics within WebSphere Portal while also incorporating offline information. This will enable clients to take advantage of Coremetrics’ complete suite of analytics and marketing applications and services.

This acquisition also expands IBM’s portfolio of cloud computing services that offer a wide range of security-rich, cost-efficient technology resources over the Web, which can be integrated with clients’ on-premise systems.

Consistent with IBM’s software strategy, IBM will continue to support and enhance Coremetrics’ technologies and clients while allowing them to take advantage of the broader IBM portfolio. 

Coremetrics’ approximately 230 employees will join the IBM Software Group which has acquired more than 55 companies since 2003.

The Internet of Things (Except the iPad)

Did I mention that I’m follow the advice of the crowd (via my recent poll) and opting out of being a first-generation Apple iPad purchaser?

This is requiring a significant amount of willpower on my part.

As I watch one close friend on Twitter literally tracking his iPad’s journey from China via FedEx, and read about how iPads are all sold out before they even hit the stores, and as I conveyed to my own Web marketing team last Friday about the interesting new advertising deals being made with big magazine advertisers wanting to be first edition explorers in this new media vehicle…well, it’s just almost too much to bear.

But, I’ve been burned on first gen handhelds before. 

The original Palm Treo, for example. 

Sounded great when it first came out, cost about as much as an iPad (but this was in 2002), and it now looks fantastic in the personal tech museum in my closet.

It doesn’t help that there are now video flyovers of the new iPad apps store, complete with enticing and sexy shots of cool video games that can be played on the iPad.

But…I…must….resist…the….urge….to…be…an…early….adopter.

I already get plenty of grief for not being a card-carrying member of the iPhone community (I’m a BlackBerry, not an iPhone), although I do have an iPod Touch, which has become my best friend on long airplane journeys.

But, I own three Macs, three iPods of one sort or another, and I use Ubuntu Linux on a Dell Latitude, so I ain’t takin’ geek grief from anybody.

Anyway, all this is missing the bigger picture emerging out there, one that IBM has begun to convey in its smarter planet initiative. 

The planet is now talking to us. 

Sensors abound which collect and convey new and potentially useful information. 

There’s data everywhere, just waiting to be turned into insight and actionable intelligence.  Sensors abound which collect and convey new and potentially useful information.

But the opportunity must be seized.  Systems of systems must be instigated to turn all that data noise into insight.

This new video, produced by some of mis amigos in our new media communications team, does a brilliant job of beginning to relate this opportunity, and in the voice of some of our leading research and development minds at IBM.

Check it out….and in the meantime, be sure to send me a detailed debrief about your iPad experience!

Weathering The Storm With Business Intelligence

Top-performing companies are 15 times more likely to apply analytics to strategic decisions than their underperforming peers.

This from a new IBM study on the role information-based decision making is playing in successful business strategies during these tough economic times.

Top performers were also 22 times more prepared to challenge the status quo in their organizations, rethink their current strategies and business processes, and aggressively apply and act on new insights derived from analytics.

The study also found that top performers were six times more likely to entrust a broader base of employees with greater authority to make decisions and act on insights.

Entitled “Breaking Away With Business Analytics and Optimization,” the study was based on a blind survey of nearly 400 business executives globally, who rated their businesses versus their peers.

It was published by the IBM Institute for Business Value and is available here.

As part of the analysis, IBM consultants determined that top-performing organizations are able to more fully exploit business analytics for competitive advantage.

The study also revealed that having superior data governance — assuring that data definitions were clear, relevant and accepted — is critical to success for the top performers.

In fact, by a factor of three to one, the study found that top performers were much more sophisticated in their approach to governing organizational information relative to lower performing companies (42 percent versus 14 percent).

IBM itself is actually one of the leading users of analytics in the industry.

Our own Blue Insight initiative is a cloud computing environment that will soon be gathering information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte and helping IBM sales and marketing teams to better predict which products and services will deliver the most value to our clients.

Today, at 3 PM EST, check in with the IBM New Intelligence Video studio to learn more about this study and about how IBM’s Business Analytics and Optimization Global Business Services organization may be able to help your company improve its decision making with actionable insight.

New Intelligence for a Smarter Planet

Steve Mills kicked off today’s keynote session at the Information on Demand Conference here in Vegas with a look at how we can build “New Intelligence for a Smarter Planet.”

As an IBMer myself, I’ve followed the evolution of this initiative (I hesitate to call it a “campaign”) with great fascination, both as a marketer but also as a student of the world.

For me, the essence of smarter planet is this: We on the globe face some substantial challenges, but if we do things smarter, and if we better gather and use information and data that is everywhere around us, we can make some substantial forward progress, save lives and resources, and create a better world.

It’s a hard value proposition to argue with.

Yes, we believe IBM technology can, and already is, playing an integral role in facilitating this evolution towards a smarter planet. Specifically to this conference, IBM Software and Information Management software.

Steve started his discussion with a few thousand attendees this morning by articulating some of these pressing problems: We live in an incredibly fast changing world, we have enormous inefficiencies, there are loads of opportunities to change things for the better.

By way of example, he mentioned that fresh water is soon to be the scarcest commodity on the planet, but that if we work smarter, not harder, we can improve our use of the limited water resources we do have.

He explained that a smarter planet is one that is instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.

Instrumented meaning the opportunity to measure inputs and outputs in ways previously unimaginable, to the end of obtaining new and invaluable data.

Interconnected meaning everything, including people, objects, pipelines…use your imagination…are connected one to the other.

And intelligent, meaning we use the instrumentation and interconnectedness to derive new value and insights about the world around us.

Sounds easy, but with the information explosion we’re witnessing, we generate and collect more data than we take advantage of.

Steve informed us that 52% of users say they don’t even have confidence in their everyday information.

All of which leads many to pose the question: What does it mean, and what does it take, to be smarter?

And to provide an answer, Steve then discussed a number of IBM customers who are already well on their way to creating new intelligence (with some assistance by a distinguished panel of several of the IBM customers featured):

• Galway Bay, Ireland, for example, which is creating a smarter water management system.
• Geisinger Health System, which uses IBM InfoSphere Information Server to help doctors deliver better case through evidence-based medicine.
• The New York City Police Department, which built a crime-information system using Cognos 8 Business Intelligence software and which has criminals in NYC running for the exits
• HRAFN, a food producer in Norway using IBM Sensor and Actuator technology to track food through its lifecycle and ensure its safety and compliance with regulatory bodies

If you’ve not read the overview of what constitutes a new intelligence for a smarter planet, you can do so here, and just below you can click to watch the TV spot we recently produced to highlight the importance of fostering this new intelligence.

Putting data into action!

Next Gen Web Analytics

Just got off a Webcast entitled “Next Generation Web Analytics,” and presented by Forrester’s John Lovett, whom had somehow had escaped my radar.

Though the Webcast didn’t cover the Unica Insight tool in any detail, it did provide an excellent overview of how organizations need to evolve and adapt if they’re to fulfill the promise of customer intelligence that can be delivered via the Web digital footprint.

The net? (My interpretation):

• Web analytics made a promise it couldn’t keep…the infinitely measureable Web didn’t materialize.
• Data collection is the root of complexity…Stop digging through the logs, you’re missing the forest for the trees.
• Value is in the empowered interpretation, not the enduring collection, of Web customer intelligence.
• The “action chasm” renders analytics inert. Need to move towards an in-dash navigation.
• Which means more data confidence is required, so folks stop questioning the accuracy and focus on the actionability.
• Orgs need to build a foundation of analytical excellence, which begins with a strategy that evolves out of guiding business objectives.
• Technology is simply the enabling factor.

Smart and somewhat self-evident stuff, but easy to lose sight of in an enterprise with lots of switches, levers, and pilots.  : )