Talk to an engineer, and the world is full of big data promise. But those who work at the front end the tech industry — business development, sales and marketing people, for example — have largely been cut out of that conversation. That appears slowly to be changing, with the rise of startups that are dedicated to figuring out how to harness big data in a way that is digestible to those who would benefit from accessing it, but have not been able to up to now. One of these, Origami Logic, today is announcing that it is picking up a Series A round of $9.3 million to develop an analytics platform — still in stealth mode — that aims to give marketers access to big data in a way that is digestible and usable by them specifically.
The round was led by Accel Partners, as part of its Big Data Fund, and also had participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and other investors.
The company is only planning to launch its product early next year — Origami is currently putting some trial customers on the platform now, but declined to say who they were. As it is described by Opher Kahane, the CEO and co-founder, Origami sounds fascinating, and very timely. The idea, he says, is to let sales and marketing people incorporate disparate strands of marketing data — covering areas like CRM, social media, email campaigns, surveys, and more — into a single platform, which then collates and processes it for them to produce salient data. In turn, that becomes usable for further campaigns, or to measure the effectiveness of those that have already been run.
The name “Origami Logic” says it all: creating pretty shapes out of what otherwise looks like a flat expanse of not very much promise. In other words, big data is something that can and will be used by more than just engineers over time.
“Modern marketers need to make daily, critical decisions amongst a growing plethora of customer touch points including social, mobile, web, search, display and email and a radically changing customer purchase journey,” says Kahane. “Today, many marketers are faced with data silos, making it difficult to capture the entire picture.” He says he wants Origami Logic to be the “single lens through which marketers derive data driven insight across all of their marketing efforts.”
Sounds great, but it takes a leap of faith for VCs to put a significant sum of money into a project that is treading into unchartered waters and has yet to be proven with actual customers.
According to partner Jake Flomenberg (who is, along with Ping Li, joining Origami’s board), part of the attraction here for Accel and the others is the fact that Kahane and his co founders, Ofer Shaked (now the CTO) and Alon Amit (VP of product) have collectively years of experience as successful entrepreneurs. Shaked had worked at Yahoo with Amr Awadalla, who is now CTO of Cloudera (another Accel portfolio company) and helped commercialize Hadoop. Shaked left Yahoo to help create CurrentTV and this is his third startup. Kahane, meanwhile, gained experience in Israeli intelligence and had also founded and sold Kagoor Networks to Juniper. Alon Amit comes from Facebook, where he had been project managing the social network’s ad engine, mobile advertising and sponsored stories.
The other important selling point is that Flomenberg believes that what Origami is doing is an essential evolution of how big data is being used by the tech industry. He calls Origami’s proposition “Splunk for marketers,” referring to the service that offers analytics to monitor enterprise apps, and he believes that this will be something that will become even more commonplace in the world of big data. “Both myself and the others at Team Accel, we think data-driven apps are the next stage for big data. Without apps to make big data usable, it will reamin a big pile of data siloed in different places.”
Indeed, the idea, says Kahane, is to incorporate as many applications as a person would want to into its platform. “We are entirely open on the idea,” he says. “The vision is to take marketing tools that are already in use today, for example Buddy Media or Hootsuite for social media management, Exact Targeting for e-marketing; Eloqua for email; Google for ads. These would become data sources on the hub that we’re building.”
There is of course the question of how Origami Logic will fit in with all the marketing platforms — and big players — that are already established in this space. I personally think that this sounds like just the sort of technology that Salesforce either needs to build or buy. On that point, Kahane is sanguine for now. He sees companies like this as competitors only in the “longer term,” he says. For now, “It’s about stitching together… We are more like partners. Their experience has been about content management, whereas we are on the analytical side. Longer term, as these companies try to stitch these things toether, there is a cometptive force, but it will be hard for the larger guys to be focused and nimble as we can be for now.”
In addition to using the new funds to continuing development of the platform, Origami Logic will also use some of it to staff up. The company is currently hiring engineering, design and data science folks, and encourages people to email them for more details if they’re interested.
-->End of panel-container -->→ Learn moreOrigami Logic is developing a breakthrough product for visual, self-service analytics specifically built for marketers. We apply big data analytics, data science and data visualization technologies to deliver insights through a delightful, marketer-friendly user experience.
Big Data: Investments Flow into the Next Big Thing
By Dick Weisinger, on January 4th, 2012Analysts seem to agree that the stars are aligning for Big Data. Nearly every end-of-year list of predictions for the direction of IT in 2012 includes Big Data.
James Kobielus, Forrester analyst, wrote on his blog that “Big data was inescapable in 2011. Without a doubt, it was the paramount banner story in data management, advanced analytics, and business intelligence (BI). The hype has been relentless, but it’s been driven by substantial innovations on many fronts.”
In presentations both Gartner Vice President David Cearley and Gartner analyst David Cappucio identified Big Data as one of the top 10 strategic trends for IT in 2012.
Information Management magazine reports general agreement among analysts like Thomas Davenport. The article reports that ”Big data analytics will top all other areas of growth in analytics during 2012 due to the rapid expansion of social, mobile, location and transaction-based data taken in by various industries, according to predictions from the International Institute for Analytics.”
Ken Vander Wal, CISA, CPA, international president of ISACA said that “Big Data is going to evolve out of its ’shiny new object’ status in 2012. IT leaders will need to figure out how to coax order out of the chaos from all those zeroes and ones, as well as optimize ROI and manage data privacy.”
Patti Prarie, CEO of Brighter Planet, wrote on the Huffington Post said that Big Data Analytics will be a hot trend in 2012, explaining that “As the volume of enterprise data sky-rockets, an industry is growing up around using this flood of information to help companies operate more efficiently and sustainably. Companies increasingly will be deploying sophisticated software as a key component of their sustainability strategy.”
Hot technologies attract money and interest from venture capitalists. It’s no different now with what’s happening in the area of Big Data.
In December, in an article on IT investment areas for 2012, writer Clint Boulton identified Big Data as a ”market too that is ripe for investment and acquisition.”
The New York Times reports Peter Goldmacher, an analyst and managing director at Cowen & Company as saying that “Venture capital is absolutely foaming at the mouth over big data. The volume of data being created now is not 10 times bigger, it is like a thousand times bigger.”
Paul Sloan executive editor at C|Net writes that “Big data was a big term in 2011 and, as fuzzy as it sounds, it represents a monstrous opportunity for companies beyond the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and LinkedIn. Anyone using an app-loaded smartphone is generating data that can be mined and made useful.”
Financial analysts identify IBM as a strong player because of their trove of Big Data technologies. Online investment site seekingalpha writes that IBM “is at the center of the big data trend and is going to capitalize on the information revolution better than anyone… Big data is a high margin business.” IBM has a big stake in Big Data, but more likely, startups are where most of the new Big Data action will happen.
Accel Partners have set up a $100 million venture fund for investments called the Big Data fund. The Wall Street Journal reports that the fund ”will focus on infrastructure, storage, security and enterprise applications, all the way up to business intelligence, mobile apps, financial trading apps and more.”
Mu Sigma, foe example, an Indian big data, analytics and decision support services for global enterprise customers company, secured a $108 million investment round led by General Atlantic.
Other examples of startups starting to receive money include PlaceIQ and GridGain.
The Wall Street Journal reports that PlaceIQ, a stealthy geolocation and big data company that tracks where smartphone users are and what they might be doing, raised $4.2 million in venture funds. In December, startup GridGain, a company specializing in high performance cloud computing and real time big data processing received a $2.5 million Series A round of financing led by RTP Ventures.
The trend of Big Data investments is likely to pick up later in the year.January 4th, 2012 | Category: Big Data3 comments to Big Data: Investments Flow into the Next Big Thing
[...] years, opening a lot of opportunities for new startups and business ideas. Big Data companies like Mu Sigma, has been able to secure more than $100 million in a recent investment round, a quantity not so common for non business-to-consumer [...]
[...] years, opening a lot of opportunities for new startups and business ideas. Big Data companies like Mu Sigma, has been able to secure more than $100 million in a recent investment round, a quantity not so common for non business-to-consumer [...]
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