The first SaaS BI company acquired

Thank you Stan Pugsley for passing on news of a new BI acquisition. Sharp Analytics, the forward thinking SaaS BI company, was acquired by iCrossing, a digital marketing agency. Seems my 10 Q&A with Chuck Sharp was timely (the acquisition was unknown to me at the time).

So why would a marketing agency acquire a subscription-based BI company?

Sure. There is the marketing alignment between the two companies. The synergy between sharing the same clients. But for a marketing agency to get into ETL, data integration, statistical analysis, and cleansing of data seems to be a detour from it's core competency.

What were they thinking.

iCrossing provides pay-per-click, search optimization, and landing page services that improve the success of a company's marketing campaign. Target specific demographics. Media placement. And once a campaign is run, the result produces boat loads of data.

But it's only data.

How well did the campaign perform? What demographics bought what products? Did the campaign make money? There are no actionable insights. Where's the BI? Actually Sharp Analytics offers this analysis. Search keyword analysis. Track search rankings. Click fraud reports. Paid search analysis.

Marketing BI.

Now iCrossing with Sharp Analytics can offer a full range of services to their clients.

I guess that was their thinking.