How customer voice
drives business

An estimated $14 billion is spent on business intelligence (BI) software each year. Last year, the market grew more than 8 percent, with certain segments like Cloud BI growing much faster. ­It is also attracting a lot of investment capital. BI software companies Domo, Thoughtspot, Birst, GoodData, Looker and Tidemark raised over $200 million in investment capital in 2014 alone. Business Intelligence software is also an extremely popular category on TrustRadius. Unique page views for BI software products – a measure for how many people are running evaluations – grew 16 percent from Q2 to Q3. While page views are not an absolute representation of category growth for a variety of reasons – including our own improvement in search rankings – they are a good proxy. The most evaluated BI product on TrustRadius in Q3 by a fair margin was Tableau, followed by Qlikview. The next most evaluated products were IBM Cognos, Tibco Spotfire, and SAP Business Objects. While evaluation frequency is typically a good thing, it can also signal that you are being frequently considered for replacement. Three of the top four most evaluated products – Tableau, Qlikview, and Tibco Spotfire – are discovery/ visualization tools. Two of the top ten most evaluated solutions – Birst and Domo […]

Social Media Management remains a fast growing software category. Page views on TrustRadius for Social Media Management Software products – a measure for how many people are running evaluations – grew 27 percent from Q2 to Q3. While page views are not an absolute representation of category growth, they are a good proxy. While Social Media Management remains a fragmented category, with more 137 vendors listed on TrustRadius, and many companies using multiple social media management products, a few vendors are starting to break from the pack. The most evaluated social media management software product on TrustRadius during Q3 was Hootsuite Enterprise, followed by Sprout Social and Sprinklr. It’s important to note that some of these products do quite different things, e.g. Woobox focuses on social media based contests, but they are all in the broad category of social media management. These products also sell to different market segments, which can account for differences in evaluation frequency. Using reviewer mix on TrustRadius as proxy for customer mix, and assuming prospective customers follow a similar distribution to existing customers, it’s possible to make an educated guess as to evaluation frequency by customer segment. For example, in the enterprise segment, based upon review mix on TrustRadius, 37 percent of Hootsuite […]

Marketing automation is a hot category. Google searches for “Marketing Automation” have increased by about 50% in the last year, and the evaluation frequency of Marketing Automation software products on TrustRadius increased 25% from Q2-Q3. But just how much are companies spending on marketing automation software and to what degree are its features being put to work? TrustRadius recently completed a survey of Marketing Automation users across small businesses, mid-sized companies and large enterprises to answer these two questions. Key Findings Annual software expenditure aligns with company size. For example, 65% of small businesses spend less than $12,000 per year. 86% of very large enterprises (>5,000 employees) spend more than $60,000. Annual software expenditure also aligns to database size, which is correlated to company size. Core marketing automation features like email marketing and email management, landing page creation and customization, lead management and scoring, and reporting and analytics, are used widely across companies of all sizes. The use of lead management and scoring functionality is, however, more prevalent in very large companies with more than 5,000 employees. Read the Report Interested in other insights from our survey? We’re publishing our findings via SlideShare (click here): TrustRadius Marketing Automation Survey Results 2014. As always, we […]

InsightSquared raises $13.5m Series C Round to further develop SMB Business Intelligence offering InsightSquared provides business intelligence software to SMBs, with a particular strength in dashboards and pipeline analysis for the Salesforce platform. Hot on the heels of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud announcement last month, and following funding announcements by a number of new BI entrants like Domo, ThoughtSpot, Tidemark, and Looker earlier this year, this funding provides further evidence that the BI market is red hot. This new infusion of cash brings the total raised by InsightSquared over its four-year lifespan to $27m. The company has been growing quickly, doubling headcount and revenue over the last year. BI software was historically something that only large-enterprises had the capacity to use. The category was dominated by enterprise vendors like IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects and MicroStrategy. More recently, data discovery and visualization tools like Tableau and QlikView, along with cloud BI vendors like Birst and GoodData, have succeeded in making BI accessible to the mid-market, but these tools still require a level of technical sophistication that is beyond the purview of many small organizations. This is the challenge that InsightSquared has taken on: making BI a feasible option for small, unsophisticated […]

Struggling to make sense of the complex and fast moving social media management vendor landscape? Don’t know which tools you should be looking at to engage in social selling or which ones you should use to track the effectiveness of your social campaigns? You’re not alone. As social media has entered the business mainstream, evolving from a marketing experiment to an enterprise-wide imperative, social media tools have proliferated and many have greatly expanded in scope.Unfortunately, most of the coverage to date has grouped products that do very different things into a single view and additionally only covered a small subset of the the landscape. Until now. Based upon first hand descriptions of use cases described by end-users product reviews on TrustRadius, our research team grouped the social media management tools into the seven primary use cases social media management software professionals are trying to address: Click on the image below to see a larger view Share this Image On Your Site </p><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p><br /><br /><br /><br /> <strong>Please include attribution to blog.trustradius.com with this graphic.</strong></p><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p><a href=’http://blog.trustradius.com/2013/10/seven-use-cases-for-social-media.html’><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <img src=’http://www.trustradius.com/downloads/smmslandscape.jpg’ alt=’Social Media Management Software vendor infographic’ width=’540px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /><br […]