Many companies base their business model on privileged access and efficient management of information. Either by the amount of data they have, or by the way they manage it, they get better results thanks to the information they handle. At Mind we know that the best decisions are the result of handling the best information, but the best information is of little use if it is not easily understendable, and helps making those decisions. One of the advantages proposed by the famous ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is precisely to make all data circulating in the company understandable and useful.
But right now it is Big Data and Business Analytics (BDA) that are breaking into the information management market, as the volume of data available to companies, inside and outside of them, is has multiplied. Not in orer to gain an advantage over your competitors, but because not having a clear and structured information can be a huge disadvantage nowadays. As demand for these services grows, so does the market. According to the “International Data Corporation” (IDC), the BDA market is expected to obtain revenues of 260,000 million dollars by 2022. This would imply an annual growth of almost 12% between 2017 and 2022.
The emergence of this market has raised concerns among technology companies, causing, in some cases, interesting corporate operations. To mention some:
- Google´s purchase of Looker Data Sciences: the purchase was announced by the company led by Sundai Pichai on June 6, for a value of $2.6 billion. Looker is an American start-up that raised more than 200 million dollars in funds. The objective of the Montain View firm is to integrate Looker into its Google Cloud services, thus expanding its offer in business intelligence and data analysis.
- Salesforce´s purchase of Tableau: The world leader in customer relationship management systems (CRM) acquired, shortly after the integration of Looker in Google, Tableau Software Inc. The purchase of one of the leading companies In data analysis amounted to more than $15 billion dollars, making it the largest acquisition of Salesforce to date.
Once again we see how Mergers and Acquisitions (M & A) are used by large companies to enter markets with great potential. Both Google and Salesforce intend in this way to become strong in the market by standing up to existing services like Microsoft’s Power Bi.