Onyx Upgrades Analytics Application

Onyx (Nasdaq: ONXS) has upgraded its analytics application with the introduction of Onyx Analytics 3.0, a product within the vendor's Performance Management portfolio. New features in this release include scorecarding and event monitoring functionality.

Scorecarding allows users to monitor and rate performance against certain targets. Event Monitoring allows users to relate actions to significant business events.

Other features in the application include predefined and self-service reporting capabilities and comparative analysis of customer data, using predefined and custom online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes. Also, drill-down capabilities enable users to view all the way down to the individual customer record.

Introduced in 2001, Onyx Analytics is based on the best-of-breed Cognos 8 (Nasdaq: COGN) platform; it was customized for integration into the Onyx environment.

Increasing Focus

Analytics is becoming an area of growing focus for companies that already use CRM. "They see it as a tool to improve customer retention, improve marketing and profitability," Nucleus Research Vice President Rebecca Wettemann told CRM Buyer.

"Companies that effectively use analytics as part of their total CRM environment are better able to make insightful decisions regarding customers and markets, and typically recognize a higher return from their CRM investment than those that don't," noted Paul Greenberg, industry analyst and author of CRM At the Speed of Light.

More and more CRM vendors are building up their analytics capability, according to Wettemann, either through partnerships with best-of-breed providers, through acquisition or through organic development.

Path of Growth

These partnerships are of key interest to the best-of-breed analytics providers as well.

The North America Enterprise Analytics Markets earned revenues of US$2.22 billion in 2005, according to new figures from Frost & Sullivan, which estimates this market will reach $4.54 billion in 2012, with a compound annual growth rate of 10.8 percent during 2006-2012.

There are several paths of growth that analytics vendors might take, suggested Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Arun Ranganath, such as forging strategic relationships with industry partners or system integrators, and developing vertical offerings.

Recent regulatory changes around the world and across several industries -- requirements embodied in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel-II, for example -- should provide additional opportunity, according to the report.

The report also noted that in order for wider adoption of analytics applications to occur, vendors must overcome several challenges -- including some outside of their control, such as poor data quality and integration bottlenecks at customers' sites.

"The complexity in IT infrastructure and disconnect among various enterprise systems stretch the integration process and [this] ultimately results in delayed realization of return on investment from analytics deployments," said Ranganath.