The analytics startups market was a hive of activity last week. As well as more established companies making exciting announcements, such as IBM’s new software-defined storage technology and SAS’ expansion of their Hadoop in-memory analytics range, it was a big week for the startups too.

Monday saw Splice Machine’s Hadoop database launch into public beta. Talking about the unqiue features of their software, Splice Machine CEO and co-founder Monte Zweben said: “It’s radically different to anything else that’s out there because it’s the first true ANSI SQL transactional database on the Hadoop stack. It can power concurrent applications. People can read and write from the database at the same time.” Splice Machine also claim the price-performance of their software is ten times better than that of Oracle RAC Implementations.

On Wednesday, Platfora, another company working with the Hadoop stack, announced updates to their software which would allow for increased data mobility. In this update, data in Platfora “lenses” can be made available for statistical analysis in R, or for integration into recommendation engines. Ben Werther, founder and CEO of Platfora said new software would allow organisations to “interactively work with multi-structured data”, and would help them “create new opportunities and solve once unsolvable problems, often within days of installation”.

Wednesday also saw the announcement of Acxiom’s acquisition of startup LiveRamp. However, initial excitement around the acquistion quickly dissolved when Acxiom’s shares plummeted 21% on the day of the acquisition. Shares are down 42% overall this year- it will be interesting to see what strategy Acxiom come up with to try and turn this around.

As the market for big data analytics continues to expand, it’s good to see a diverse range of companies- from big names to startups- staking their claim to this incredibly profitable industry.

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(Image credit: Platfora Website)

Acxiom announced on Wednesday that it had agreed to acquire ad-tech startup LiveRamp, a company that helps marketers use their offline CRM and transactional data on the web. The deal will cost $310 million and is expected to close mid-summer.

When LiveRamp started in 2012, it had 116 clients. This figure quickly rose to 223 in 2013, where the company experienced 92 percent growth and an increase in revenue by 143 percent.

However, today shares of Acxiom plummeted by 21 percent, translating to a net loss of $0.38 per diluted share. According to Dan Salmon, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, investors are sceptical about the deal between the two companies because they do not understand LiveRamp’s business, or how it will help Acxiom. “Most investors aren’t very familiar with this company and they paid a lot for it, and it was very dilutive to earnings,” said Salmon.

Moreover, investors have noted that the deal looked expensive. Given that the Acxiom executives are expecting $25 million to $30 million in revenue from LiveRamp in the fiscal year ending March 2016, the $310 million acquisition has caused skepticism over Acxiom’s purchase.

As Elizabeth Dwoskin commented on the Wall Street Journal, Acxiom shares are down 42 percent this year – including Thursday’s sell-off – and investors are concerned about whether the company “can navigate a transition from storing data to serve direct mail and email marketing, to a player in the faster-growing digital-advertising world.”

Acxiom declined to comment on the news.

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(Image Credit: Andreas Poike)

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will be partnering with several big data firms – including Datalogix and Acxiom — to track the “offline” sales impact of Google AdWords ads. The Internet giant will match the cookies on users’ computers to in-store sales information — which will be provided by Datalogix and Acxiom — to see whether conversion rates are impacted by their advertisements.

“We’re running a number of tests to help clients use their own sales data to measure how their search campaigns impact sales,” a Google spokesperson told the WSJ.

Google seems to be following the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter; both companies partnered with the same big data firms to analyse the effectiveness of their advertisements in relation to offline sales (Facebook in 2012 and Twitter in 2013).

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(Image Credit: Mark Knol)

Acxiom is a stock exchange-listed company offering marketing and information management services to its clients. By sifting through mounds of data collected itself Acxiom manages to generate sufficient insight for their clients to aid them in e.g. targeting their advertising campaigns better. As “one of the biggest companies you’ve never heard of” (FRONTLINE, June 2007), it helps marketing departments uncover the (un)known needs of consumers. Acxiom was founded in 1969 in Conway, Arkansas and now employs 6200 people (2012).

SMEs which have risen to leveraging the value of Big Data are using services such as cloud computing and open-source software to realise various goals. At the same time, they are keeping in loop with the new cheaper ways to learn from data that are emerging with time. Phil Simon cites example of Kaggle, Acxiom and DataLogix as companies which are already  offering valued inexpensive Big Data services to SMEs.

Kaggle – a company which seeks to make data science an affordable fun sport. It offers crowdsourcing , social network, wiki, and job board opportuities on one portal, easy to be eased by SMEs lacking tech and data savvy talent.

Acxiom and DataLogix – are data brokers which provide SMEs with highly valuable data at reasonable prices. For example these data brokers obtain names of expectant parents and families with newborns from Experian (a marketing-services unit of credit reporting giant ) and sell it to relevant SMEs.

Phil notes that a lot of new ventures are jumping on the bandwagon to provide valuable Big Data services to SMEs. Not that these small big data ventures would replace the bigger corporations but they would offer the affordable to the ones who need it – the SMEs.