FirstRain Private Vendor Watchlist Profile: Next-Generation Personal Analytics Through Value-Added Content

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1 INSIGHT FirstRain Private Vendor Watchlist Profile: Next-Generation Personal Analytics Through Value-Added Content David Schubmehl Mathew Wisniewski IDC OPINION FirstRain Inc.'s personal business analytics provides organizations with news and insight into their customers, markets, strategy, and competition. The company was founded in 2000 and became focused on providing business professionals, especially sales and marketing, with the information and data that they needed to compete effectively. Enterprises have contracted with FirstRain and its OEM partners to get relevant details into the changing characteristics of their customers and markets, with which they can make better decisions, get closer to customers, drive greater sales, and outwit the competition. FirstRain's patented, advanced analytics technology finds relevant business-focused Web and social media insights and then delivers it seamlessly into the world's premier CRM and social enterprise platforms, including Salesforce Chatter; Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics, and Yammer; Jive; and Oracle. This same intelligence and data is incorporated into leading research platforms such as Fidelity.com, Dun & Bradstreet, and Interactive Data. IDC believes that FirstRain is a company to watch because: FirstRain is delivering information and analytics combined in an intuitive and easy-to-use package as a cloud-based service to Fortune 1000 organizations all over the world. The information is timely and accurate and is automatically kept up to date by using advanced technology to monitor the worldwide Web and other open data sources such as Twitter and Facebook and direct connections to LinkedIn. FirstRain is at the forefront of a rapidly emerging and evolving market that IDC calls valueadded content, where open source data is collected through various automation and collection techniques and is aggregated, curated, and combined with other types of metadata to provide crucial insights to organizations and enterprises in a wide range of industries and vertical markets. It is also using advanced analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools to present this information to its users and customers in a variety of form factors and on a wide array of devices ranging from iphones to tablets, desktops, and Web browsers. December 2014, IDC #253310

2 IN THIS INSIGHT Overall Score: 18/20 This IDC Insight analyzes FirstRain, a company competing in the business analytics and valueadded content markets, and reviews key success factors: market potential, products and services, competitive edge, corporate strategy, and customers. Detailed subquestions make up each of the five success factors, which are assigned a value from 1 (weak) to 4 (strong). Leveraging IDC's expert understanding of the competitive landscape and future outlook, this document provides insight into private companies based on IDC's unique watch score system. 18 Market potential: Market growth potential, strength of competition, and current stage of market (early adopters versus late majority) Products and services: Level of differentiation, disruptive capability, and scalability Competitive edge: Competitive landscape and peer assessment Customers: Number of existing customers, quality of existing customer base, geographic reach, and size of addressable market in the next years given the vendor's current capabilities Corporate strategy: Go-to-market strategy, management pedigree, and financial status (running on venture capital with insignificant revenue versus self-sustaining and not seeking additional rounds of funding) SITUATION OVERVIEW I. Market Potential Score: 3/4 Market 3 FirstRain's cloud-based personal analytics products and APIs participate broadly in two markets business analytics and value-added content. The IDC competitive market for business analytics grew 8.2% in 2013 to $37.7 billion. The market is now forecast to grow at a 9.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through IDC defines the business analytics software market as the combination of the data warehouse (DW) platform software with performance management and analytic applications and business intelligence and analytic tools. The value-added content market is an emerging market, fueled by open source data collection, aggregation, and curation. This data is collected, archived, and transformed with metadata and then is sold to organizations that need to understand their prospects, customers, products, and the markets in which they exist. While parts of the business analytics market have been around for decades, the area that FirstRain competes in is currently still in the early adopter stage, combining advanced analytics with open source data that FirstRain has collected from the Web. IDC has not yet estimated the size of the value IDC #

3 added content market but will do so in early However, it is safe to say that the overall data-as-aservice market is a multibillion-dollar market and is growing quickly, with companies such as Oracle, Twitter, Facebook, and even Google competing in various segments of the market. FirstRain's annual revenue is currently in the $10 million to $25 million range. It grew 100% in revenue in 2013, and it has expectations for a very strong 2014 as well. II. Products and Services Score: 3/4 3 FirstRain Personal Business Analytics FirstRain's personal business analytics is a cloud-based SaaS product that gives every business professional a personalized and customized view into his/her customers, markets, strategy, and competition. Just-in-time highly relevant prompts are built with each person's particular needs in mind and tuned to the company's strategy and market conditions. The data and analytics from FirstRain enable organizations and business individuals to become more predictive and proactive based on relevant insights and therefore more productive. FirstRain personal business analytics can be accessed by subscribers in multiple ways, including native mobile smartphone apps (ios, Windows, and Android), ipad, FirstRain Web browser app, CRM (Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM), enterprise portals/intranets (SharePoint, Jive, etc.), and BI platforms like Salesforce's Wave Analytics Cloud. The system is tightly integrated into Salesforce and its Wave Analytics tools and provides customized insights in those platforms. Figure 1 shows the FirstRain application inside Salesforce, while Figures 2 and 3 show various aspects of FirstRain's mobile application. The personal business analytics product is reasonably priced at $70 per month per seat for annual contract for as few as 10 seats in an organization IDC #

4 FIGURE 1 FirstRain Salesforce App Source: FirstRain, 2014 FIGURE 2 FirstRain Meeting Briefs Mobile App Screens Source: FirstRain, IDC #

5 FIGURE 3 FirstRain Mobile App Source: FirstRain, 2014 FirstRain API The FirstRain API is a cloud-based developer product that provides enterprise developers with realtime data-level access to the FirstRain business graph generated using real-time big data analytics of millions of sources, documents, and social media from across the global Web. The FirstRain business graph extracts the deep, interconnected relationships between companies, businesses, and markets and also includes access to users' own personal predictive analytics profiles through a RESTful secure API. The JSON objects returned include (where appropriate) the industries, companies, and matched topics. Going beyond pure tagging, FirstRain provides a "Relevancy Match" for each matched entity. This combination of business analytics and personal analytics profiles allows developers to deliver actionable business insights within their own applications using the FirstRain API. FirstRain Platform Solutions FirstRain's cloud-based OEM platform solutions integrate into almost any third-party environment to deliver with minimal disruption to existing IT operations. Many OEM platform customers also choose to 2014 IDC #

6 add the full power of FirstRain's personal business analytics with a single line of code, making them fully deployed within days or utilize the FirstRain API. FirstRain platform solutions provide customer and industry insights to keep users inside platform ecosystems and increase productivity by leading/bridging users into more transactions. FirstRain also help provide additional information beyond traditional research reports. FirstRain is currently providing data and insights within the leading research platforms such as Dun & Bradstreet, Fidelity.com, Interactive Data, and Mergent. III. Competitive Edge Score: 4/4 4 FirstRain's technology for information space modeling captures the global universe of unstructured data and applies layered algorithms to extract meaning and value. FirstRain identifies key semantic and structural characteristics to build an evolving business graph that reveals understanding of the business universe and relationships. The pipeline discovers correlations, trends, clusters, unusualness, applies skepticism, and many other nuances to reflect the real-world and human perspectives. Its technology is designed to reflect ever-changing market perspectives across all industry sectors and thousands of end markets. The company's analytics engines extract meaning, create flexible relational structures, and build dynamic systems of data that is business aware. By leveraging this technology, FirstRain is also user adaptive and pragmatic. It leverages human perspective, awareness, and preferences to deliver analytics with the user in mind. FirstRain's technology is supported by 10 patents around content aggregation, discovery, and analytics that have been granted to them by the U.S. Patent Office. Competitive Landscape FirstRain occupies an area of the business intelligence market that is relatively untapped to date, with only a few direct competitors in the competitive intelligence space, such as DigiMind, Avention (formerly OneSource), InsideView, Dow Jones (Factiva), and even traditional search engines like Bing and Google. In all of these cases, the combination of data with advanced analytics and data collection technologies is most advanced with FirstRain. Other related companies in the value-added content market that could potentially become competitors include HG Data and DataSift. Probably the largest competition comes from larger companies that could enter into this market from related markets such as Oracle's Data Cloud group (formerly BlueKai) or LinkedIn that already offers its Sales Navigator platform to corporate customers. However, in each of these cases, FirstRain offers a more compelling offering to its customers, hitting their sweet spot in terms of competitive and sales intelligence. Partners Current FirstRain partners and OEMs include Salesforce, Dun & Bradstreet, Oracle, Microsoft, and Interactive Data. FirstRain also has a very active channel strategy and is working with other publishers to incorporate the FirstRain platform into their product offerings IDC #

7 Challenges and Threats FirstRain is a strong technology and product company that has made significant inroads with key partners and OEMs like Salesforce and Dun & Bradstreet. Probably the biggest challenge that FirstRain face is around making prospects and markets aware of its products, technologies, and services. FirstRain needs to increase its sales and marketing presence, both here in the United States and also in Europe and Asia. Probably the best way to do that is to make additional investment in sales and marketing, both in terms of go-to-market practices and in terms of programs, as well as increasing sales head count in North America and establishing sales organizations in Europe and Asia. If FirstRain doesn't make these investments and become better known in the market, there is a chance that other organizations could enter the market with similar tools and technologies and overtake FirstRain. IV. Customers Score: 4/4 4 Key customers of FirstRain include IBM, General Electric, Microsoft, Cisco, Honeywell, HP, Pfizer, Motorola, Fidelity, Dun & Bradstreet, Air Liquide, Emerson, Johnson & Johnson, Flextronics, Rambus, and Astellas. Key vertical markets include finance, healthcare, industrial, telecommunications, and technology. Currently, FirstRain is focused primarily on B2B enterprises, with greater than $500 million in annual revenue although; it recently opened up its pricing to include licenses of as few as 10+ seats with an annual contract. The FirstRain products have global coverage in 160+ countries with the sales team based in North America. V. Corporate Strategy Score: 4/4 4 Leadership Penny Herscher is the President and CEO of FirstRain. As CEO since 2005, she has transformed FirstRain into a leading provider of personal business analytics solutions for sales, marketing, and business professionals around the globe. Prior to FirstRain, Herscher was CEO of Simplex Solutions, an electronic design automation company serving the global semiconductor industry. As CEO, Herscher grew Simplex from just a few engineers to a profitable, high-growth software company. She led the company to a successful IPO in 2001 and then through its sale to Cadence Design Systems in At Cadence, Herscher was general manager of a major division and also chief marketing officer. From 1988 to 1996, Herscher was an early employee and senior executive at Synopsys. She began her career in 1982 as an R&D engineer with Texas Instruments and then Daisy Systems. YY Lee, COO, brings strong operational leadership and experience to her position at FirstRain, leading engineering, modeling, and analytics in the United States and India. Under Lee's guidance, FirstRain teams developed the patented technology and analytic algorithms that power the FirstRain solution suite. Lee was the most recently vice president of Worldwide 2014 IDC #

8 Services at Cadence Design Systems, leading that business into profitability. Before Cadence, she cofounded the software company Aqueduct, subsequently acquired by NetManage, which she joined as a director of Engineering. Lee began her career at Bell Labs, Integrated Information Technology (IIT), and Synopsys. Ryan Warren, VP of Marketing and Market Development departed in October 2014 and was replaced by Daniela Barbosa, VP of Marketing and Alliances. Key Acquisitions To date, FirstRain has not made any acquisitions. Current Investors FirstRain has secured $59 million in funding over the past several years. Current investors include Oak Investment Partners, Diamondhead Ventures, and Ampersand Capital Partners. The company is not currently seeking additional funding. Company Overview TABLE 1 FirstRain Company Snapshot Category Functional and secondary markets Details Business analytics and value-added content Founding year 2000 (full restart 2006) Number of employees 165 Number of customers 140+ Company location Web site Revenue estimate San Mateo, California $10 million to $25 million Source: IDC, IDC #

9 TABLE 2 FirstRain Funding History Round Date Amount ($M) Investors AA March Oak Investment Partners, Diamondhead Ventures, and Ampersand Capital Partners AAA December Oak Investment Partners, Diamondhead Ventures, and Ampersand Capital Partners AAA Ext February Oak Investment Partners, Diamondhead Ventures, and Ampersand Capital Partners AAA Ext July Oak Investment Partners and Diamondhead Ventures AAA Ext December Oak Investment Partners and Diamondhead Ventures Source: IDC, 2014 TABLE 3 FirstRain Peers Company Name Revenue Estimate Watch Factor Score Investors HG Data $5 million to $10 million 16/20 Rincon, EPIC DataSift $10 million to $25 million NA NA InsideView $20 million to $35 million NA Emergence, Rembrandt Source: IDC, IDC #

10 About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world''s leading technology media, research, and events company. Global Headquarters 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA idc-insights-community.com Copyright Notice This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit Please contact the IDC Hotline at , ext (or ) or sales@idc.com for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or Web rights. Copyright 2014 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.