20 companies to watch in 2012

Although many companies , Trinity Mirror and Rentokil to name but two, have migrated fairly critical systems onto Google Apps, others have been less eager to do so. Can corporates really give up their MS Exchange/Outlook dependencies? Maybe 2012 will establish this.

GreenPlum
GreenPlum, acquired by EMC in mid-2010, is potentially very interesting as a way to make sense of the mass of unstructured big data from social sites. Many large organisations, especially those with strong brand identities, are interested in how to measure consumer sentiment about their products from what they say on social media. The company specialises in Big Data analytics that can be helpful in this. The company’s commitment to the Hadoop open source community and focus on matching up structured and unstructured data signals that it is likely to be a strong player in the emerging market for analytics.

Harmon.ie
As organisations increasingly look for better ways of collaborating electronically than email, the greatest challenge they face is convincing employees to tear themselves away from the familiar, comforting email client to take advantage of better alternatives. Harmon.ie allows new tools into that email client instead. This reduces the burden on users by helping them access content in tools such as SharePoint without needing to switch between applications, and learn new UIs. As an independent player, Harmon.ie's solution makes a lot of sense for the many SharePoint customers facing this adoption challenge. The company is ambitious to expand to become an integration point between a wealth of social and collaborative applications, we expect Harmon.ie to make a significant impact in 2012.

I-movo.com
With the adoption of smart mobile devices starting to outgrow the sales of desktop PCs, the potential for commercial services to be offered over these devices becomes very strong. Big players like Visa have already paved the way for payments over mobiles and other players in this market will soon follow suit. I-movo.com provides secure vouchers to multiple devices – a factor competitors have so far failed to make the most of. This means the company could steal a good chunk of the NFC payments, cash out and vouchers markets. Brands already signed up include Coca-cola, Fosters and Nestle

MePlease
This is an interesting loyalty platform. MePlease provides a solution that takes social CRM and enables it on any platform, device and to any CRM application. With so many legacy applications still existing in companies, particularly in retailers, a solution that can bridge across the social media world and behave like an in-house product has big potential. The opportunities for real targeted social marketing is huge.

QlikTech
QlikTech deserves to be on the list of companies to watch in 2012 because it continues to give larger BI players, such as Oracle, IBM and SAP Business Objects, a run for their money. The company's offering based around an associative in-memory database has paved the way for easier and faster ways to query, perform calculations and find visual patterns and relationships in data. Today around 22,000 organisations in more than 100 countries use its Business Discovery platform, QlikView, to this effect. The company’s recently released QlikView 11, which includes new capabilities for collaborative decision making, mobile BI and platform extensibility, will provide a valuable test of whether the company can build and continue to sustain this market momentum.

Quartet FS
This company produces ActivePivot, the first of a number of proprietary large scale in memory cube technologies that allow real time-data analysis and modelling. It creates near real time insight and reduced time to data value. Loved in the city where timely data-processing is highly valued, but already moving into big data in the retail, media and telco markets

Rimini Street
Rimini Street provides third-party support for JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP licencees, offering a saving on direct support of 50 per cent. A potentially interesting supplier, particularly if it commits more to a UK presence. Given the economic climate, anyone who can disrupt by undercutting incumbents such as SAP and Oracle has the potential to do well.

See also: Good Times for CIOs on Rimini Street

Shaker.com
The rise of social networking is expected to continue into 2012 as businesses start to adopt similar mechanics internally and to interact with customers over established social media.

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