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Gotta Have Analytics

I was reading a post by Sam Whitmore about the top Enterprise trends for 2006 that included Microsoft Office 12 and Analytics. With the launch of Microsoft Office12, now just about everyone can have analytics. Analytics have long been the domain of Business Intelligence vendors providing advanced applications geared towards domain experts and business analysts. Sam pointed out a good article in Network World on the hot analytics space that mentioned market size for Analytics software was sized at roughly $15B in 2004 according to IDC. Most analytics solutions are focused on particular business functions (sales, marketing, CRM) and customized extensively for each client to analyze their markets, business lines, products, customers, competitors, channels and regions targeted. Without customization, analytics solutions are too vanilla to provide valuable insight. With customization, they can be targeted carefully so that they help guide analysts to interesting trends, data anomalies, performance issues and market opportunities.

Microsoft will have to take the vanilla approach in order to deliver a basic solution that can be useful to millions of customers. That most likely means that out of the box, it won’t provide much value to many customers who will need customization in order to find it useful. But, the trend towards analytics for all is a reflection of the demand for accountability at all levels of business.

By opening up the possibility for millions of users to embrace analytics, Microsoft is enabling businesses at every level to improve business processes that should result in better services, solutions and products for their customers. I suspect that marketers at small companies that can’t afford the advanced solutions already on the market will be some of the first business users to embrace Microsoft analytics. Marketers at medium-sized companies will probably wait until VARs provide some level of customization but I’m sure that won’t be too long because:

  1. There is nothing to lose from better marketing analysis and many customers to gain
  2. You can be sure that other business areas in the company will start using these new features and asking marketing folks "where are your analytics?"

Posted by Julie Woods on November 9, 2005 at 06:24 PM | Email this post Permalink

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