Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

When organizations need to optimize their business processes and improve operations and decisions, the often speak of having the right information at the right time, but don’t always make that a priority. This information optimization is often thought to be expensive and time-consuming, especially with advent of big data and disparate data sources across cloud and on-premises environments, as I have articulated. Datawatch can help business get to information of any variety or volume at any time through its access and integration tools. When I published my last analysis of Datawatch, it had made significant advancements in its platform, with enterprise-class reliability and support for business analytics through its data discovery and virtualization processes. Over the last year Datawatch continued to grow its business worldwide, and through investments into its marketing, sales and product efforts is finding more potential from existing and new customers. The company’s energized product efforts earned it our 2012 Technology Innovation Award for Information Applications for its Information Optimization Suite.

Datawatch has simplified its product portfolio over the last year, focusing on how organizations transform, distribute and optimize information. Its Monarch Professional, Data Pump and Enterprise Server products respectively support these common functions. It has expanded its support for big data to ensure that no matter where information exists, it can be optimized for use across business and IT. In its 11.6 release Datawatch added support for Hadoop and Hive through its Data Pump product. It also works with commercialized Hadoop providers such as MapR, which provides enterprise-scale deployments. Datawatch supports other types of big data technologies, including RDBMS, appliances and systems, which a third of organizations in our big data research are planning to adopt.

Datawatch brings information into business processes through support for a range of environments. For instance, in cloud computing, it partners with Amazon Web Services, a rapidly growing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, for a range of applications and tools. Our research finds that business has led the way to cloud computing. Datawatch can operate safely and securely across these environments with little impact to IT.

Datawatch continues to advance in many small but critical capabilities, such as document approval and state management. It optimizes information processing through prefetching data needed by the operating environment. It has added visual presentation methods to its product, including traffic lights and thermometer gauges, and lets users drill down to any level of detail. It now provides Section 508 compliance for supporting the disabled, for which it has created a template that can be adapted to an organization’s specific needs. Datawatch products are used for a wide range of governance and compliance needs.  Our research finds that the cost of compliance is rising faster in the last three years, according to 53 percent of organizations in heavily regulated industries.

Datawatch now provides more power to analysts and individuals who need to facilitate information optimization through the Monarch Power Client, a visual environment that was part of the Monarch Professional 11.5 release. This product helps address assembling information into a view, a process that almost half (47%) of organizations in our information applications research found challenging. Monarch Context for Excel helps address the issues in using personal productivity tools with support for secured embedding of information inside spreadsheets and for data lineage. Data is always more valuable when it is a click away, rather than accessible only upon request from a separate analyst.

To support specific needs of IT, Datawatch supports machine data that is generated by applications and systems, which, if shaped in the right format, can help optimize not only IT systems and resources but also business processes. Datawatch can take data in log files and database and combine it with information in reports, documents and HTML pages. Datawatch recently announced it can utilize machine data from Microsoft Windows.

Datawatch has grown through partnerships with software providers such as Qlikview, helping them get access to semistructured data, and solution providers such as Asta Systems. Resellers use Datawatch as a new business enabler to empower the optimized use of information across an enterprise. For global deployments, Datawatch supports languages like Japanese and Chinese and unique character sets. Support for and focus on partners is a critical investment for Datawatch as it seeks to grow globally. I would like to see Datawatch provide a version of its product for free trial on its website, operating either in the cloud or on the desktop.

Datawatch makes information optimization more readily available at an affordable price. Its software’s ability to access content and semistructured information and blend it with structured data is what organizations require to optimize business processes and make more informed actions and decisions. Our research into business technology innovation finds the needs to improve and drive better quality in processes are important to more than half of organizations. We are busy researching information optimization to see how the best practices and efforts of organizations are changing how technologies are used for business.

Datawatch finds itself at the intersection of information needs for an enterprise. I would like to see more support from the company for mobile technology, and simpler methods to flip through information assets and even collaborate on them, but with its current focus on its foundation and enterprise-class requirements, those features represent potential for providing more value by harvesting its investments in big data and cloud computing. Organizations should examine Datawatch to see how it can help them leverage investments to access and integrate information and meet business needs while meeting IT requirements for security and policy compliance. Its progressive software earned Datawatch our 2012 Ventana Research Leadership Award for Information Applications for its deployment at Piedmont Henry Hospital.  If you are looking to get information from any source to any form for any business need, see how Datawatch meets the requirements of the next generation of information optimization.

Regards,

Mark Smith

CEO & Chief Research Officer