CASE STUDY: Build collection of interesting companies in a sector

Sector: Business Intelligence

The case study involves completing 3 broad steps mentioned below:

1. Select interesting companies
2. Assign companies to sector buckets
3. Write company brief

The following note on the sector will help in completing the 3 steps.

Develop Understanding of the sector

Read the definition of the sector given below. Understand it clearly through the examples provided.

Sector Definition:
Companies providing software solutions which help in analyzing data sets to support business decision making
These software solutions help managers and researchers, make better and faster data driven decisions.

What companies does the sector include

Includes companies that provide solutions across all industries for:
● Data Cleansing and Migration
○ accelario.com​: helps in copying relevant data from various databases to an analytics environment
○ dataladder.com​: matches relevant data, de-duplicates them and merges various data sets to be
used for running analysis
● Data Integration
○ snaplogic.com​: helps establish connectors to various data source applications like ERP, CRM,
HRMS softwares in order to extract data which could be analyzed
● Data Visualization
○ tableau.com​: helps companies plot their business data in order to visualize the data and draw
insights from them
● Industry Specific Vertical Analytics Solutions for HR, Sales, Marketing, eCommerce, Retail etc
○ insidesales.com​: analyzes the data of potential customers of a sales team and helps them
prioritize their sales strategy and schedules based on that data

What companies does the sector exclude

● Service and Consulting firms using technology products of other companies for data analytics
○ tessella.com​: provides custom services for analyzing the data of an organization on-demand from
the organization but does not offer any product for the organization to conduct the analysis on
their own.
● Server architecture providers for analytics
○ nutanix.com​: provides compute and storage infrastructure for implementing analytics as well as
non-analytics requirement of an organization
Step 1. Select interesting companies
Conduct a secondary research on 30 companies given in the section I of this ​form and classify these companies by
the various sector-wise buckets provided in the same form.

Guidelines to conduct secondary research

● Read the website of the company fully

● Google about the company to check latest updates / news, team, implementation etc
● Read through the LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media handles to improve your understanding

Definition of the buckets are examples for each are provided in the table below:

Buckets Definition Examples

Companies that provide software solutions for
data lineage and creation of metadata sets that
Cataloguing and serve as a repository of information on
Metadata Management databases waterlinedata.com octopai.com
Companies that provide software solutions to
prepare data into suitable formats for
downstream analysis and companies that
Data Cleansing and provide software solutions for direct migration
Migration from one format to another. accelario.com stilo.com
Companies that provide software solutions for
integrating data from disparate sources for
Data Integration further analysis and visualization. snaplogic.com talend.com
Companies that provide software solutions for
Data Discovery and data exploration, visualization, reporting, and
Visualization dashboarding. tableau.com domo.com
Companies that provide Business Intelligence
(BI) and analytics solutions for specific
enterprise functions such as sales, marketing,
operations, HR, and IT as well as for specific
BI Vertical Solutions industry verticals. uptake.com insidesales.com

Examples of Business Intelligence companies classified by Buckets

Company ​WaterlineData ​clearly says "​Data Catalog Solutions that Connect the Right People to the Right Data" and
"There are two major aspects to the data cataloging process. The first is to help data professionals discover,
organize and curate data and the second is to expose the newly organized data for business professionals to use.
Waterline Data Fingerprinting™ automates this process, making it easy to connect the right people to the right
data."
This indicates that ​WaterlineData i​ s a Data Cataloguing company.

Step 2. Write Company Brief

Shortlist a set of 5 best companies from the 'Yes' selected ones in Step 1 and write a brief about them in the space
provided in the Section II of this​ form​ (50 to 100 words). Guidelines to write brief are given below:

Guidelines to write a company brief

Cover following points or anything else that you might deem fit:
● What does the company do
● Capture what is unique about the company's offerings or products
● Capture if there are any proprietary technologies used or developed by the company
● Identify and capture, what are some of the implementation metrics (like reach, revenue, geographies
present in etc.)
● What makes the model of this company interesting and investable
● Strictly avoid copy pasting data from any source

Example of a good company brief

ThoughtSpot - ​thoughtspot.com
ThoughtSpot is built to be used with zero training to ask questions, analyze company data, and build reports and
dashboards - all in seconds - using a browser-based search interface. ThoughtSpot combines data from data
warehouses, Hadoop, on-premise and cloud apps, and spreadsheets, scales to billions of rows, and deploys in
under an hour using in-memory technology. The company's founding team has previously built market-defining
search and analytics technologies at Google, Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft. Some of its customers include
Rambus, Sterlingbackcheck, Forrester Consulting and more.