When Tom Clancy introduced a panel discussion yesterday at a forum on analytics software, the founder of San Diego’s Tao Venture Partners said the forum was “founded four years ago by people who had an interest in seeing San Diego get established as a leading cluster in the analytics space.”
The forum, which is sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council, offers an annual snapshot of local developments in a booming industry that has become crucial to business intelligence, data storage and management, and complex decision-making.
Since Robert Hecht-Nielsen founded HNC Software here in 1986, the number of companies that focus on analytics software in San Diego has mushroomed, with more than 100 companies specializing in neural networking, data mining, pattern recognition, and related algorithms and technologies for analyzing data. Yet Clancy and local experts who discussed “opportunities in analytics” lamented that San Diego’s standing as the birthplace of some key companies and technologies has gone largely unrecognized. Among the examples cited:
— HNC, which specialized in technology to analyze credit card transactions, was acquired for $810 million in 2002 by Fair Isaac and Co. and integrated with the Minneapolis, MN-company’s credit-scoring business.
—Urchin Software, a suburban San Diego Web analytics company that developed an assortment of tools for measuring website usage, page views, and other statistics, was acquired by Google in 2005 for an estimated $30 million. Seven months later, Google renamed its Urchin business Google Analytics, and made analytics tools available to Web users for free.
—WebSideStory, a San Diego company that developed website traffic analysis tools, rebranded itself as Visual Sciences in 2007 and was acquired later that same year for $394 million by Utah-based Omniture. (Last month, Omniture was itself acquired by San Jose, CA-based Adobe Systems in a $1.8 billion deal.)
—Carlsbad, CA-based analytics software developer Keylime Software was acquired for $9.5 million in 2003 by Pasadena, CA-based Overture, an advertising distribution network that was later acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion.
Such deals reflect a surging awareness of the value of data, says Stephen Coggeshall, a co-founder and chief technology officer for San Diego-based ID Analytics, which uses advanced analytics to search credit databases for telltale signs of identity theft. In terms of technology innovations that will likely lead to forming new companies, Coggeshall says
