Apigee Buys InsightsOne For Big Data Analytics

API management company Apigee has acquired InsightsOne, which provides big data predictive intelligence to help businesses understand consumer preferences.

Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor said the move bolsters Apigee’s big data initiative, which the company began two-and-a-half years ago.

Single Vision

Indeed, InsightsOne expands Apigee’s big data analytics portfolio, giving business leaders a platform that integrates predictive analytics with adaptive digital infrastructure for real-time action. InsightsOne will be offered as a stand-alone product today and part of Apigee’s integrated digital business platform for mobile apps, APIs and predictive data analytics in early 2014, the company said. Waqar Hasan, InsightsOne CEO, will join Apigee’s executive team.

“Success in today’s mobile-first digital world requires a single vision that spans and connects business and technology,” Kapoor said in a statement. “In this new world, the business intelligence and context gleaned through the massive amount of big data available about customers, products, developers – every part of a digital business – must be tightly integrated with technology infrastructure to affect real change. InsightsOne dramatically expands Apigee’s big data predictive analytics capabilities, and we welcome the accomplished InsightsOne team to Apigee.”

InsightsOne delivers big data predictive intelligence products to marketers and customer service organizations serving the health care, financial services, telecommunication, and e-commerce space. For example, InsightsOne can predict which health care payer members are likely to complain, so that proactive member outreach can be done. For marketing, InsightsOne could trigger a targeted buying offer for a high value customer at the right time, through the right channel. InsightsOne delivers a predictive analytics infrastructure that is consistent with Apigee’s big data offerings, built on top of a massively scalable distributed processing foundation based on open-source Hadoop and an in-memory real-time processor.

“Predictive is the ‘killer app’ for big data, and Apigee is the only company that delivers predictive analytics with API and app infrastructure in an integrated platform,” Hasan said in a statement. “InsightsOne is a natural fit for Apigee, expanding its big data analytics to make all customer interactions smarter and more effective. We are thrilled to be joining Apigee as the company helps businesses – including many of the world’s largest companies – transform into leaders in the new digital world.”

“We have always said APIs would become mainstream, and we started the journey with analytics over two years ago,” Kapoor told eWEEK. “The first thing we did was to add some of the people we needed to enter the analytics space, next we delivered a product, and now with the acquisition of InsightsOne we have an entire team to help us execute on our big data analytics strategy. Our goal is not just to help developers build applications, but also to help executives build businesses.”

Hasan said the InsightsOne unit consists of about 30 people, including engineers and developers. The addition of InsightsOne gives Apigee an advantage over other API management organisations, as well as over other big data solution companies, Kapoor said.

Predictive, Not Reactive

“Unlike us, pure big data players have no way to change the infrastructure like we do; they are read-only or reactive,” he said. “And the folks on the API side are only doing the application side of things, but we think combining the two gives us an advantage.”

In the so-call app economy, APIs are a way for companies to connect applications and access and distribute data.

Actionable big data analytics has been a core capability in Apigee’s integrated platform. Last year, the company introduced Apigee Insights, a big data analytics product that improves business results by applying context and predictive analytics. InsightsOne adds consumer predictive analytics to Apigee’s big data capabilities, significantly expanding the insights and context available to Apigee customers from its digital channels. InsightsOne and Apigee together give organisations predictive big data analytics and the digital infrastructure to make informed business decisions and to act on those decisions in real-time, for enhanced agility in the digital enterprise.

“We started on the premise of making the business-to-consumer world more relevant and profitable by delivering solutions that help companies make their customers happy,” Hasan said.

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Originally published on eWeek.