SAP Gets Into the Social Analytics Game With NetBase Partnership - ellingtonditer1959

Taking a cue from rivals so much as Salesforce.com, SAP happening Monday proclaimed a partnership under which information technology will resell and support social media analytics software from NetBase.

NetBase is one of a growing miscellany of vendors with platforms that ingest large amounts of data from social websites such as Facebook and Twitter, and then analyze it to give companies a sense of what multitude are expression about their products, strategies and brands.

The move follows Salesforce.com's attainment earlier this year of Radian6, a NetBase competitor, besides As Oracle's recent US$1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, which has social-media monitoring software among its offerings.

Blackjack could have formed NetBase-comparable technologies on its own, but partnering with the marketer gets information technology in the spunky many quickly, said Byron Sir Joseph Banks, vice president of information management resolution merchandising. He declined to address wherefore SAP didn't acquire the company as an alternative, saying IT does not discuss its "buy versus partner" strategy in public.

The software will represent sold as Tire Social Media Analytics starting in January, Banks aforesaid. Pricing is based along user seating room and the number of topics a company wants to track, said Lisa Joy Rosner, NetBase's chief marketing officer. They declined to provide Thomas More specific pricing information.

NetBase's cloud-based system has a 30TB database of social media information that gets reinvigorated on an current basis at the rate of about 90 million posts per day, reported to Sir Joseph Banks. "Anyone can connect to this system and get access to a year of vogue information."

But NetBase's NLP (natural language processing) capabilities are what really put IT apart from competitors, Rosner aforesaid. "What we know how to do really well is read language at scale," and with great sophistication, she said. "If someone says, 'I love the iPhone, it's unagitated,' We know that the 'it' refers to the iPhone," she said.

NetBase can also observe degrees of sentiment, she added. "There's a difference betwixt, 'I care the iPhone' and 'I adore the iPhone.'"

SAP has come upwards with most a dozen potential integration points with its other products, including a number of CRM (customer relationship management) modules and various members of its Business Objects BI (business intelligence) portfolio. None of those integrations will equal available at launch, but customers will have access to a Web-services API (application programming port) that they can exercise for immediate projects.

SAP is hoping to push the NetBase product to farthest more than the usual suspects in the marketing section, according to Banks. Sales people can use IT to fine-tune pricing strategies and get closer to customers, while consumer production development groups can ameliorate their planning processes, he said. "What trends in fashion are expiration to be relevant next spring? If you're going to be doing sea [production], you need to know forthwith."

Companies can and should get in beyond simply monitoring social media, Forrester Research analyst Zach Hofer-Shall wrote in a recent report.

One step to take is to push social media data into selling dashboards, helium wrote. "For example, i consumer banking company created a 'brand health exponent' that is a compounding of the volume and sentiment of online conversation, mainstreamed with its website view scores and responses to phone surveys."

Beyond that, companies should try to tie down social information to actual customer records, allowing markets to target specific individuals supported discussions they'Ra having on social sites, Hofer-Shall wrote. "This approach comes with privateness concerns and limitations around data matching but has established effective for some queen-sized consumer brands."

Companies such as Fliptop proffer services that are supposed to make this process easier, Hofer-Shall added.

Merely it's important to recognize that social analytics are in their youth, according to Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with Altimeter Mathematical group, which has provided advice to NetBase and several of its competitors.

"This is such a nascent space," she said in an interview. "IT's nascent and it's also all ended the map. Information technology's comprised of a bunch of a different kinds of companies that are being lumped together."

Radian6, with its social media dashboards, has served as a general archetype, Etlinger added. But companies like NetBase and Crimson Hexagon have superior textual matter-analytics capabilities, she said.

NetBase as wel has a larger archive of social information, freehanded it an edge over rivals, she said.

As for the SAP-NetBase partnership, "there's a peck of proof-of-concept that needs to be cooked," Etlinger said. "With Radian6 and Salesforce.com, their structures are not that different. With SAP and NetBase it is a very different kind of tool. Information technology's not only about marketing, it's about product growing, provide chain planning, essentially any place in the organization where sociable media could put up some perspective."

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise computer software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Serving. Chris's email call is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com