Companies to Watch 2002These companies will be increasingly important contributors to the intelligent enterprise this year
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INTELLIGENCEAlphablox Corp.
Founded: 1996
HQ: Mountain View, Calif.
President & CEO: Polly Sumner
Alphablox extols a component-based approach to customizing analytic applications, offering programmable infrastructure that delivers information "at the point of decision." Its new release adds load balancing and easier application server integration to the mix.
Brio Software Inc.
Founded: 1989
HQ: Santa Clara, Calif.
President & CEO: Craig Brennan
Stagnant IT budgets have complicated Brio's effort to reclaim lost market share, but it can still claim to offer intelligent enterprises among the most complete product portfolios available — comprising online analytic processing (OLAP), reporting, and application design tools, as well as one of the more mature portal solutions in Brio Portal.
HNC Software Inc.
Founded: 1986
HQ: San Diego
CEO: John Mutch
HNC's quiet domination of the predictive solutions market should have an even bigger payoff in 2002. The erstwhile artificial intelligence company's Critical Action platform offers analytics and decision-management technology favored by many advanced financial institutions, and now counterterrorism needs to have organizations in other sectors evaluating HNC's expertise.
Hyperion Solutions Corp.
Founded: 1991
HQ: Sunnyvale, Calif.
Chairman & CEO: Jeffrey Rodek
In 2001, Hyperion rediscovered its inner self: the widely popular Essbase analytic server and financial analysis apps such as Hyperion Planning. Hyperion's recently announced integrated application framework reflects a potentially fruitful enterprise strategy, and its work on the XML for Analysis spec could yield interesting development opportunities.
Information Builders Inc.
Founded: 1975
HQ: New York City
President & Founder: Gerald Cohen
Information Builders added by subtraction in 2001 — spinning off its EAI and mobile computing units into a subsidiary called iWay Software. WebFocus is well known for its flexibility, open architecture, and relatively low cost of implementation, and the latest upgrade adds interesting "knowledge mapping" capabilities.
MicroStrategy Inc.
Founded: 1989
HQ: McLean, Va.
Founder, Chairman & CEO: Michael Saylor
The company still has work to do to fully recover business viability, but the MicroStrategy platform is simply too well regarded — and has attracted too many customers and partners — for us to expect anything but success. Among its most notable features is the SDK, which offers impressive custom development firepower.
OutlookSoft Corp.
Founded: 1999
HQ: Stamford, Conn.
President & CEO: Craig Schiff
Traditional financial planning software companies could learn something from OutlookSoft. The company has a persuasive vision for customers moving beyond a static, compartmentalized approach to financial planning. Its Enterprise Analytic Portal combines budgeting, planning, reporting, and OLAP in a Web-based package with an Excel interface.
SAS Institute Inc.
Founded: 1976
HQ: Cary, N.C.
Chairman & CEO: James Goodnight
SAS's famously devoted customer base helped make the company the world's largest privately owned software vendor. In 2001, the company toiled to parlay its data mining and statistical analysis expertise for CRM leadership; in 2002, a strategic alliance with IBM should help SAS garner its share of financial services engagements in that area.
SPSS Inc.
Founded: 1968
HQ: Chicago
President & CEO: Jack Noonan
"Data mining makes the difference," says SPSS, and it's easy to understand why: Its Clementine tool, which stands out for its GUI interface, gives the company contender status in clickstream mining and predictive modeling for CRM. In 2001, SPSS ramped up its Web data analysis capabilities by acquiring NetGenesis, and Siebel Systems made Clementine a key component in its customer intelligence strategy.
Teradata (A Division of NCR)
Founded: 1884
HQ: Dayton, Ohio
Chairman & CEO: Lars Nyberg
Teradata remains a popular data warehousing platform among large customers with multiterabyte environments because of its Bynet parallel architecture, support for highly complex queries, and modest maintenance requirements. Recognizing Teradata's potential role as an enterprisewide, near-realtime CRM engine, NCR has augmented that platform with customer analytics and campaign management technology in its Teradata CRM solution.
Visual Insights
Founded: 1997
HQ: Naperville, Ill.
President & CEO: Douglas Cogswell
Visual Insights' visual query and analysis technology lets users with modest information manipulation skills "fly through" massive SQL Server data structures. The company is currently on an e-business performance management kick, but its Advizor tool continues to impress users of multidimensional databases augmenting traditional analytics with visual discovery.
— Justin Kestelyn
  
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