Satya Krishnaswamy, Founder & CEO NextPrinciples and a self proclaimed “closet geek”, spoke with John Furrier and David Floyer on Day 2 of SapphireNOW 2013 about understanding data, and solutions which help users to do just that.

It is well-known that real time information is really critical for businesses, and understanding the data, and what to do with it, is a really big thing. Everybody knows the future of marketing is “engagement”, but you cannot engage what you do not understand. So, in this environment, Satya Krishnaswamy agreed that the space is full of noise, plagued with confusion regarding analytics and engagement, and so on.

NextPrinciples was designed so that, from Day 1, it could be a platform where users could not only do analysis, but take actions.

“We tried to avoid offering users a solution that was too complex to use, making them ignoring it or outsource it”, said Krishnaswamy. “Once they do the analysis and understand what they want, they can take action from within the same platform.”

Companies are understanding now that Social needs to be integrated with all the other back-end systems. NextPrinciples is using HANA not only for “real time memory portions”, but for the text analytics library integrated within, enabling automated analysis for their business users.

The key integration challenges seem to cluster around the signal to noise ratio. It’s all about the integration of the right type of data. For example, if a customer interacts with you over Twitter and over call center, how do you merge this information together? This is a rather old master data management issue, resurfacing in the context of social.

NextPrinciples’s go-to-market strategy is SaaS (Software as a Service), and it was chosen keeping in mind the way the current market is progressing. In the fast-moving business like the social business, where the business users need fast access to the information themselves, having big monolithic structures and the IT department “hand-holding the customers” is not an option.

HANA initially came out as an on-premise software. But after the feedback received, it was deployed on the cloud as HANA 1.

The sentiment analysis

Most of the social data is automated and processed according to certain keywords. NextPrinciples loves the text analytics library of HANA because it enables the analytics of the sentiment. Not only that, but after the analysis is done, action can be taken from the same platform. The user can create a ticket, it can forward the issue to another department or it can generate new content (action).

Satya Krishnaswamy, the man who “built SAP’s CRM practice in Asia from scratch to $15M”, is glad that – from a social perspective – the hype cycle is over and the vanity metrics (clicks, pageviews) do not matter as much.

Today we have social analytics and social CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and the focal points are analytics and engagement. In this ecosystem, NextPrinciples is trying to make it easier for the customer to navigate the data, in order to make the correct decisions and to take the correct actions.

The ultimate validation of the simplicity of the whole self-service capabilities they built in is that all their customers (including two of the big pharma companies) went live with their solution in two hours or less.