Analytics have been used in business since at least the late 19th century when Frederick Winslow Taylor sought to improve industrial efficiency. Soon after, Henry Ford measured the build time of each component in his automobile assembly line to drive better results.
It was in the late 1960s when analytics began to command more attention with the advent of computers in decision support systems. Since then, analytics have formed the development of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data warehouses, and a large number of other business intelligence software tools and processes.
Within the last decade, the core companies which solidified the business analytics and business intelligence software industries have been joined by a wave of startups. These agile companies have provided unique value with software as a service focused on collaborative analytic tools for data analysts, cognitive plug-in-play systems for business users and decision analysis software that is simplified for management
Roam Analytics
Roam Analytics raised over $9 million (USD) in series A capital. Roam’s machine learning platform helps pharmaceutical and medical device companies to better predict outcomes. Roam combines flexible data ingestion, predictive modeling, and purpose-driven user interface design to enable rapid in-depth decision analysis supported by data.
Valor Water Analytics
Water utilities face major financial challenges not limited to revenue impacts of conservation and huge infrastructure costs – yet there very little innovation in the water SaaS arena. Valor Water Analytics, a Y Combinator funded company, is revolutionizing the water utility industry by transforming water utility data into financial solutions.
Valor Water Analytics is a subscription based software as a service product that allows utilities to dig deep into their customer data, identify and solve problems varying from leaky pipes to tampered meters to changing their pricing model that can have a significant impact on their revenue.
Socialight
Socialight, an IBM incubated startup, translates real-time data from millions of social media users into powerful marketing insights. Thier proprietary system consumes and analyzes posts and user data from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to create a multi-dimensional picture of what your audience is talking about, when they aren’t talking directly to you.
Vero Analytics
Departments are looking for new ways to build insights without relying on IT. Vero Analytics promises to make analytics fun again by giving you time back. Built for non-SQL experts, Vero writes SQL, blends data, builds data pipelines so analysts can go about actually analyzing data instead wrangling a mess of scripts. Vero’s patented query engine generates high performance queries that run natively on your database platform.
Mode
Mode, a startup which built a cloud service that data analysts can use to query and run reports on data, promises to give analytics teams superpowers. Mode makes businesses and communities more analytical with collaborative tools for data analysts. By combining analytics tools with a collaborative user experience Mode is alleviating the most pressing bottleneck for analytical organizations. Mode announced back in August of 2015 that it raised $7.5 million (USD) in series A funding.
It’s a growing space to watch. According to market watcher Pringle & Company, the global market for business intelligence (BI) software services was to hit roughly $143 billion in 2016. Around two thirds of BI-related spend will go towards services such as consulting, development and integration. They also found that analytics – the use of statistical analysis to interrogate data – is the fastest-growing component of BI. The market for analytics software is growing by 19% annually, compared to 16% for the BI market as a whole. These 5 players are well positioned to take advantage of this industry, only time will tell if they achieve success.
