Report: Top Analytics Developments That Took Place In 2019

The passing year has witnessed some great acquisitions, partnerships, innovations, high-profile funding/investments and the rise of new-age startups in the field of analytics. 2019 was undoubtedly an eventful year for the analytics world.

From game-changing deals like Google's acquisition of Looker to strategic alliances like IBM and Cloudera to Automation Anywhere receiving US$290 million funding, a number of industry players seemed to expand their technological portfolio to brace themselves for futuristic challenges.

Here is a look at what Analytics Insight thinks were the significant developments in the Analytics industry in 2019.

Analytics Mergers and Acquisitions

The year 2019 witnessed some significant acquisitions and mergers in analytics that are rocking the industry. Such deals are anticipated to transform the landscape of key industry players in context to analytical offerings. One of the most prominent acquisition was of Looker by Google.

Google – Looker

In June, Google announced it will secure Looker, a hot analytics startup that has raised more than US$ 280 million. The company is paying US$ 2.6 billion for the benefit and adding the organization to Google Cloud.

This move marked the first major acquisition for new Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, and Google's recent multi-cloud strategy shift that has comprised the release of Anthos, a rebranded Google Cloud Services platform which plays nice with AWS and Azure. In its statement, Google says, "the deal builds on an existing partnership where the two companies share more than 350 customers, including BuzzFeed, Hearst, and Yahoo."

Commenting on the acquisition, CEO Thomas Kurian said, "Google Cloud is being used by many of the leading organizations in the world for analytics and decision-making." According to him, "The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation. We remain committed to our multi-cloud strategy and will retain and expand Looker's capabilities to analyze data across Clouds."

Logi Analytics – Zoomdata

Another celebrated purchase was of Zoomdata by Logi Analytics, Inc. ("Logi") in June. Zoomdata is the leading analytics platform for big data and live streaming information. The acquisition sets Logi's position as the pioneer in embedded analytics, presently with the most extravagant suite of abilities and a worldwide partner network.

Nick Halsey, CEO of Zoomdata said, "many more people will be able to analyze data in seconds, even across tens of billions of rows, within the applications they use all day, every day."

Zoomdata is Logi's second acquisition in 2019. "Logi's developer-grade platform offers the broadest set of embedded analytics capabilities in the industry, including security integration, custom theming, self-service analysis, workflow, write-back, pixel-perfect operational reporting, predictive analytics, and big data analytics. And Zoomdata's worldwide network of key resellers and systems integrators like StrategyCore, Deloitte, InfoSys, and Hitachi will help companies successfully adapt, build, and manage mission-critical applications," said Steven Schneider, CEO of Logi.

Salesforce – Tableau

Additionally, Salesforce.com Inc acquired big data firm Tableau Software Inc for US$ 15.3 billion, denoting the greatest acquisition in the organization's history as it hopes to offer more data insights to its customers. As a part of the all-stock arrangement, Tableau investors will get 1.103 Salesforce shares, esteeming the offer at US$177.88 per share.

As observed by Analytics Insight, this deal is considered to be quite huge for Salesforce in order to move ahead of CRM software and delve deep into data analytics. The deal will support the company in extending its engagement and data intelligence for the current users.

The acquisition is bringing market leaders of CRM and Analytics platform, together. While Tableau will aid customers to see and understand data, Salesforce will drive engagements and understanding of the customers.

The company officials confirmed that Seattle would become the second official headquarters for Salesforce after the closure of this deal.

Additionally, joining hands with Salesforce will accelerate the abilities of Tableau to expand its reach and make them understand data better. The company's strengthened analytics will allow millions of people to decipher insights for the betterment of their organizations.

Analytics Funding and Investments 2019

For the progress of any technological firm, investment/funding is considered as the greatest equipment to expand their reach to newer heights. As more and more companies are paving their way towards tech-transformation while imbibing new-age technologies, they are also opening their arms for remarkable monetary landmarks across their business. Here we have compiled some of the significant analytics funding/investments that took place in the year 2019.

Fractal Analytics – Apax Partners

The private equity firm Apax Funds invested US$200 million in data analytics firm Fractal Analytics Inc. for a "significant minority" stake in January 2019. Reportedly, this significant investment values Fractal Analytics at around US$500 million. The investment also marks the exit for Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd and TA Associates. The Apax investment also includes primary fund infusion into the company.

Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere, a global leader in RPA, in November, announced that it has received US$290 million in Series B funding at a post-money valuation of US$6.8 billion. The funding was led by Salesforce Ventures with additional funding from existing investors, including Softbank Investment Advisers and Goldman Sachs. The new capital will help Automation Anywhere accelerate its vision to empower customers to automate end-to-end business processes – bridging the gap between the front and back office with artificial intelligence (AI) powered intelligent automation platform. Besides, the funding will advance the company's focus on improving human-to-bot collaboration through attended automation, resulting in enhanced customer experiences and increased employee productivity.

Paytm

According to the New Indian Express, in November, Paytm announced that it will start investing in early-stage deep technology start-ups which are building technologies and solutions that can complement the digital payments ecosystem. According to a statement from the firm, Paytm is planning to invest as much as Rs 500 crore into such companies over the next few years. In a statement, the company said, "Paytm has set aside ₹500 crores to invest in early-stage companies that build complementary technologies augmenting the digital ecosystem. The statement added that it will focus on companies that are working on artificial intelligence-based technology and big data solutions to make its investment, in order to acquire or develop innovative solutions that can generate large scale employment.

Analytics Strategic Partnerships

In terms of strategic partnerships that drive enhanced efficiency and add value to the business proposition, 2019 has been quite prosperous for the analytics industry. This year companies like IBM and Reliance Jio formed strategic alliances to accelerate their enterprise-value.

IBM – Cloudera

In June, IBM and Cloudera announced a strategic partnership to develop joint go-to-market programs designed to bring advanced data and AI solutions to more organizations across the expansive Apache Hadoop ecosystem. According to IBM, as part of the partnership, the company will resell the Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub and Cloudera DataFlow. On the other hand in addition to that Cloudera will begin to resell IBM's Watson Studio and BigSQL.

Scott Andress, Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances at Cloudera, commented, "By teaming more strategically with IBM we can accelerate data-driven decision making for our joint enterprise customers who want a hybrid and multi-cloud data management solution with common security and governance." He further stated, "we are pleased to have expanded our relationship with IBM, and I am very encouraged by the momentum that our companies have continued to generate together since the merger."

Reliance Jio – Guavus

In August 2019, India telecom and mobile data major Reliance Jio partnered with California-based Guavus for artificial intelligence (AI) driven data analytics which would help enhance former's services to its customers and also address critical service operations. A joint statement by both the companies cited, "Guavus' AI-based solutions will provide real-time customer experience analytics, predictive analytics to automate network troubleshooting and key marketing insights to Jio. As a result, Jio will be able to offer superior service to its customers while addressing critical service operations with intelligent automation."

"Guavus provides us data analytics technology and out-of-the-box analytics solutions for intelligent operations and marketing – but they're not just fishing for us, they're giving us the ability to fish. Our teams will be able to take advantage of a 'self-service' platform to build custom analytics applications that are tied very closely to their areas of the business and to deliver quality new products much faster," said Kiran Thomas, President, Reliance Industries.

Analytics Innovations in 2019

Moving ahead from momentous collaborations through acquisitions & mergers and strategic partnerships, analytics has gone through a tremendous transformation along with novel innovations and emerging technological trends in 2019.

Here are some of the remarkable trends and innovations in analytics that embarked in 2019.

IoT Analytics

With the rise in connected networks, IoT technology and devices as well are venturing rapidly into modern workplaces. Such devices can be connected to the edge of a network and include everything from smart lighting to health monitors. According to Gartner, there will be 20.4 billion IoT devices by 2020.

As each and every IoT device are generating data that companies can monitor with data analytics platforms, data analytics is becoming an integral part of IoT infrastructure. The wave of digital transformations will incorporate IoT devices even more on a large scale, owing to the deployment of data analytics as a supporting technology. Significantly, Amazon Web Services has started to deploy its own IoT analytics solutions like AWS IoT Analytics strengthening the league of edge analytics solutions.

Augmented Analytics 

About two years ago, Gartner predicted that by 2020, augmented analytics will be the "dominant driver of new purchases of business intelligence, analytics and data science and machine learning platforms and of embedded analytics". The 2019 trend of analytical evolution seems to agree with this outlook.

According to a report, the global augmented analytics market is expected to grow from US$4.8 billion in 2018 to US$18.4 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 30.6 percent. The technology offers companies faster insights, combining machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to automate the process of generating business analytics.

The most anticipated area for the huge implementation of augmented analytics is business analytics. Furthermore, the BI industry is already being disrupted owing to the acceleration of augmented analytics that threatens to lower the barriers to entry in the industry.

The solutions enabled by augmented analytics can help data scientists to automate the process of preparing data, analyzing data and building models.

DataOps Data Analytics

2019 observed that organizations are using DataOps to build data analytics platforms more efficiently. Nexla revealed that 73 percent of companies were investing in DataOps, in 2018. Such acceleration in investment is owing to the challenges of developing and maintaining data analytics pipelines.

According to Christopher Bergh, "DataOps is the recognition that a set of problems have crept into organizations over time and slowed down productivity". He further added that DataOps "encourages data-driven organizations, to begin with, a similar practice of testing their data pipelines to build trust and evolve best practices."

Top Rising Analytics Startups of 2019

Although start-ups may be small companies yet they possess the capability and ability to contribute a lot in economic growth. Such newcomers not only create more employment but play a remarkable role in economic dynamism by spurring innovation and injecting competition.

Here are the top rising analytics startups of 2019.

Aible

Founder and CEO: Arijit Sengupta

Aible brings together a world-class team of engineers, data scientists and business experts with a single mission: to empower users to create real-world AI that delivers measurable business impact. Our team has collectively implemented thousands of successful AI projects over the past sixteen years across a wide variety of customers and industry segments and has studied at leading institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, University of Chicago and Columbia.

Alluxio

CEO: Steven Mih

Alluxio has developed a data orchestration platform for analytics and machine learning in the cloud. The company's system that is based on a memory-centric architecture fundamentally enables the separation of storage and compute functions, bringing data closer to distributed compute operations and simplifying data access for cloud workloads.

Noodle Analytics

CEO: Stephen Pratt

Founded in 2016, Noodle Analytics is developing AI-based data analysis technology that targets the major ideology of "Industry 4.0" or smart factory applications to manage product quality, asset health and production flow. The company does this in an effort to improve efficiency and reduce waste in manufacturing, consumer products, transportation, and distribution.

Panoply

CEO: Yaniv Leven

Panoply bills itself as offering simple data management for analytics. Its cloud platform is a "smart" data warehouse that automates the three major steps to successful business analytics. The steps are Data collection and transformation (ETL), database storage management and query performance management.

Promethium

CEO: Kaycee Lai

Promethium is a significant startup that addresses the challenges of self-service data discovery and self-service analytics with its Data Navigation System. It's Data Navigation System is a data context platform that got launched in October. The system employs ML and NLP to provide users with the right data to answer the right question in just minutes by locating the data, demonstrating how it needs to be assembled, automatically generating the SQL query to get the right data, and then executing the query.