Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Thanks to Datawatch, businesses may find themselves buying and deploying fewer new business analytics and business intelligence tools. As I noted in my analysis last year, the company’s new management has begun to transition it to a more appealing market position in which it helps enterprises use analytics to improve operational efficiency and decision-making. The Datawatch products focus on data virtualization – that is, accessing data from multiple sources not usually seen as accessible for analysis, such as reports and documents in Adobe Acrobat format, production systems, streams coming from cloud computing or print output, or even legacy systems. The value of this lies in reducing the time it takes to access such data and integrate it with other data to create enriched information and analytics.

Datawatch is a public company, and its recent second-quarter results show continued growth on both quarterly and year-to-year bases. The company has more than 40,000 customers in 100 countries, and its technology is used by Fortune 100 to midsize and small organizations. At the core of its growing enterprise business is Monarch Enterprise Server version 11, which was made generally available at the end of 2011. With this version the server uses Microsoft .NET and can operate in 64-bit computing environments, which significantly enhances its computing power. It offers XML export capabilities to help programmers process data further into other data streams or use it within other products; XML is the second-most important technology standard after SQL, according to our research. Version 11 also improves the presentation of information, supporting a larger display of information and multiple charts in a grid. It adds a drag-and-drop approach to help simplify the creation and distribution of information and analytics. Our business analytics benchmark research shows that analysts spend upward of two-thirds of analytic process time on data-related activities, which Datawatch can help them decrease.

Monarch Enterprise Server is part of Datawatch’s Monarch Report Analytics product family, which also includes Monarch Data Pump, Monarch Report Mining Server and Monarch Report Manager On Demand. As business analytics software, it falls in the category of what we call information applications, enabling the access, assembly and publishing of information – areas that are critical for most organizations to improve. Our information applications benchmark research found that for more than half of organizations, existing approaches are too slow and not adaptable or flexible.

Datawatch has jumped on the growing trend in enterprise software of offering its software, notably Monarch Professional, for trial to enable more individuals to see the power of the software. Report Manager On Demand lets organizations maintain an easily accessible repository of reports and documents. Well-known for its Data Pump software, the company has a large base of existing customers that may be enticed to upgrade to the enterprise versions of the Monarch technology.

I expect Datawatch to make its technology further available via cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS), a means of access increasingly required by organizations. I would like to see it further its accessibility through search and flexibility by providing access from mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets to extend its simplicity to a larger number of business users.

Organizations that are looking to leverage investments in aging applications or recent documents should look at Datawatch’s software. Its simple approach is aimed at businesses that do not want to buy a new system to perform analytics when they know that the data they need is already in existing systems; these businesses want to implement a continuous flow of information to support their analytics needs instead of copying and pasting data into spreadsheets for one-off analysis. In our benchmark research, 42 percent of organizations said they can significantly improve their use of analytics, and only 23 percent were satisfied with their current analytics efforts.

Datawatch is aligned with the current trend in the technology industry of finding methods to extend the value and use of existing systems, and one of these ways is business analytics. Its methods to virtualize data via access to semistructured information and to simplify discovery of insights from analytics are what many businesses are looking for to get more value from existing data and investments.

Regards,

Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer