• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 16, 2013

Hewlett-Packard entered the digital analytics space Wednesday to support marketers across platforms, media and content. The HP Digital Marketing Hub services offered through HP Autonomy support real-time analysis for massive volumes of information across multiple devices and media. Many of the services were co-developed with agencies and software vendors.

BlueKai, Digital River, ExactTarget, Experian Marketing Services, hybris Software, Kenshoo, Marketo and Rio SEO, along with consulting partners Covario, Critical Mass, Deloitte Digital, Realise and Sapient, helped HP co-develop the services. The partner ecosystem is essential, explains Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of marketing, marketing optimization, at HP Autonomy. "This is a complicated problem," he said. "It's about algorithms that can predict or pinpoint behavior."

Cloud services identifying customer segments and building perspective models in real time were built with technologies from several HP companies, such as Autonomy, Vertica and Labs. The platform not only integrates data from trending social media sentiment, search and display, but also Web-click streams and user–generated properties.

Mega companies traditionally supporting corporations have been moving to supporting large, traditional enterprises. HP joins Adobe and IBM. Big Blue made two acquisitions recently, both centered in analytics and data. Dublin, Ireland-based The Now Factory, a software company based in Dublin, Ireland, specializes in customer and network analytics. New York-based Xtify provides a cloud-based e-messaging platform enabling companies to push out targeted mobile marketing communications.

The customer journey from discovery to purchase typically requires more than one device and media. Data in silos prevent brands from building tools that allows consumers to start a transaction on a PC and transfer it to a smartphone or a tablet without using a search engine log-in or ID, Forrester Research Analyst Tony Costa told Online Media Daily at a recent L.A. Forrester conference.

Integrating data from a variety of media works similar to the way companies optimized shop-floor manufacturing for brands. The move took advantage of data from CRM systems, procurement, inventory control and other enterprise operations. Sunil Menon, chief technology officer of marketing optimization at HP Autonomy, pointed to shop-floor optimization and sequencing platforms for manufacturing. The theory and technology applies to manufacturing, as well as marketing for enterprise companies like DreamWorks Animation.

The HP Digital Marketing Hub combines a variety of data. Di Piazza added that the platform combines structured and unstructured data to provide better insight.