Although it may have gotten a little lost in the noise created by the Salesforce.com / VMware announcement of VMForce the day before, yesterday Attensity made what I believe is an important announcement in the social business market about their acquisition of Biz360. Socialytics, as I've discussed before, is becoming a business imperative as we create more and more social data and as the social customer and social employee gains more influence over the fate of a company. The social web gives voice to the involved individual and creates network effect to magnify influence. As a company you have to look to technology for ways to collect, filter, analyze, and create actionable information from the mountains of social data generated on the social web. That social information and its intersection with existing corporate information is business critical in todays hyper-connected business environment.
So why is this an interesting acquisition? Once again the whole (combined company) is greater than the sum of the two parts. Attensity is a leader in web 3.0 semantic analysis and natural language processing (NLP) technologies applied to business problems through a set of applications that enable deep data analysis and decision making support. Biz360 has developed three socialytic applications on the Market360 Platform, Media Insights, Opinion Insights and Biz360 community, that aggregate and analyze traditional and social media channels to provide insight into customers, influencers, financial / investment community and the press / analysts community. The combination of Attensity and Biz360 provides a complete, self-service socialytic platform that "collects" data, filters, analyzes and provides output information to support actionable business decisions across multiple interaction channels. In other words, the solution supports social CRM strategies across sales (predictive selling), marketing (sentiment analysis) and customer service (multichannel customer conversations and customer knowledgebase enhancement). These same capabilities could also be applied to internal social data for use with employees, as well as applied to social programs for suppliers and partners. Social business is about changing business culture and about engaging in the conversation, socialytic technologies like the new Attensity SCRM solution can be an important enabler in this process.
