The promise of analytics as a source of differentiation at the organizational level, in business as well as IT, remains beyond the reach of most traditional enterprises due to a combination of technical and cultural barriers that has proven too complex to be solved by a single blanket solution. So many vendors are taking an alternate route and breaking down the problem into smaller pieces, addressing the need to rein in the data explosion one department at a time.

One area that has seen a particularly large number of point solutions crop up in recent years is marketing, where statistics are increasingly replacing gut instinct in decision making and to great affect. The latest offering promising to help advertisers make that switch is Optimost VisualTest, a newly introduced cloud service from HP’s Autonomy unit aimed at simplifying the tedious task of optimizing web pages for the highest possible conversion rate.

The online tool provides a graphical interface for A/B/n experimentation, a slight twist on the traditional split testing formula that involves routing equal amounts of randomized traffic to several different versions of the same page in order to identify which variation attracts the most users. Historically, that required a great deal of manual work due to the sheer amounts of steps in the process. HP claims that Optimost VisualTest offers a more efficient alternative.

The service includes a customizable design tool for non-technical users and a dashboard that makes it possible to aggregate data from multiple sources for segmentation and behavior mapping, the company said. It also delivers real-time processing capabilities through integration with the HP Digital Marketing Hub, which was introduced last October and utilizes the vendor’s HAVEn unified analytics platform.

The sharks come circling

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The tremendous revenue potential in the burgeoning data-driven marketing space has not gone unnoticed by enterprise software stalwart SAP, which hopes to better position itself to capitalize advertisers’ appetite for analytics with the acquisition of SeeWhy. The Boston-based firm is best known for CORE,  a patented in-memory event processing engine that sifts through user interactions to identify patterns that may be helpful in tailoring content to the specific expectations of individual consumers.

SeeWhy’s other products include Ad Manager, an ad retargeting tool that works similarly to CORE and taps into multiple information streams to nudge users back to websites they have recently abandoned. The firm also offers a real-time campaign optimization solution called Browse Manager, a Conversion Manager that helps online retailers reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts and a straight-forward email capture utility known as Slider.

Together, ServiceWhy’s products recover more than $500 million in lost sales annually for 4,000 brands worldwide, SAP said in a Tuesday release. No financial terms were disclosed for the deal, but the business intelligence giant hinted that the company’s portfolio will be bundled with the  solutions it obtained as part of the 2013 acquisition of Swiss e-commerce and financial data management specialist hybris.

From better decisions to operational efficiencies

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Lines-of-businesses aren’t alone in reaping the benefits of analytics. The technology that helps marketers improve their ads is also being promoted to CIOs as a means to drive new operational efficiencies by the likes of VMware, which this morning unveiled a new version of its vCenter Log Insight tool that it claims make it easier than ever for practitioners put the data generated by their infrastructure to good use.

The release introduces a new machine learning capability that automatically groups related data to help admins spot technical problems and the ability to display information in form of tables and chart types. Further, VMware says that vCenter Log Insight 2.0 processes queries six times faster than the market leading solution (which would be Splunk) and collects data eight times faster than the previous version.

Last but not least, the new version also comes with a Windows agent that allows Microsoft shops to collect logs from their servers and desktops. The feature marks an an important expansion of VMware’s machine-generated data analytics turf and falls into step with the efforts of EMC, its parent company, to deliver a universal abstraction layer across the entire data center regardless of the solutions being used. In that spirit, the latest release of the storage stalwart’s ViPR software-defined platform adds support for competing arrays from NetApp and Hitachi.

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