The IBM press release goes further, however, by explaining the acquisition first and foremost as complementing its “strategy of bringing relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders.” Specifically, data (and its analysis) that is based on social networking activity, or in this case, enterprise social networks and the employees interacting on them.
In the words of the IBM press release: “Social media has pervaded the lives of consumers, helping them connect with each other in new ways. However, a shift is occurring in the enterprise as business leaders look for ways to generate real value through the use of social technologies to evolve their front-line business operations.”
This is indeed the trend. But the value to IBM lies not in simply helping a CEO feels he is not left behind his golf buddies (although IBM certainly satisfies this need, even creates and legitimizes it, in many ways). The value to IBM is captured in my recent definition of the First Law of Big Data: The value of data grows with the growth in the number of people sharing similar data.
But, as I and others have observed, size is just one dimension of big data, and not the most important one. Additional value comes from the analysis that companies like IBM and Kenexa apply to all of these linked, catalogued, and correlated interactions.
In other words, the Second Law of Big Data: The value of data grows with the number of innovative models applied to it.
Kenexa—and its $1.3 billion price tag—represents the value of a specific domain knowledge and how important it is for extracting the right insights from the data. As Troy Kanter, Kenexa’s President and Chief Operating Officer told the Lincoln Journal Star: "We embed the science inside those technologies." Kanter co-founded Human Resources Innovations, a company that was on the forefront of applying information technology to HR and was acquired in 1997 by Kenexa. In 1999, Kenexa reduced its focus on “discreet professional services” (according to its official history), instead opting to enhance through acquisitions its portfolio of software-driven analytical tools. Like other businesses (e.g., Splunk, 1010data), Kenexa has been a big data company before (almost) everybody became a big data company. Recently, it has started to offer its customers solutions “harnessing the power of social media.”
Social. Local. Mobile. The three big trends and business opportunities of the last few years are all about new ways to generate, capture, and analyze data. Especially analyze. When Facebook last week revealed to a few tech journalists how big its data is, VP of engineering Jay Parikh delivered an important message: “Big data really is about having insights and making an impact on your business. If you aren’t taking advantage of the data you’re collecting, then you just have a pile of data, you don’t have big data.”
IBM and its competitors are rushing to offer their enterprise customers new ways, social and otherwise, to create “a pile of data” from new internal and external sources, and provide them with the tools to find value in it.
