Summary

IRI sells consumer and market analytics and services to manufacturers and retailers of consumer packaged goods (CPG). At its annual IRI Summit in February, the company introduced its new analytics-as-a-service platform, called IRI Liquid Data, and a suite of new applications. After three years of reformulating its approach to information and analytics technology, IRI says the new product will provide unified access to key analytics, enabling retailers and manufacturers to replace outdated manual or partially automated processes in their IT and market research departments. Ventana Research believes that IRI’s new approach could deliver significant added value to the CPG industry. Organizations in this industry that are looking for integrated market information and analytics in a “pay as you go” sales model should consider IRI Liquid Data, while bearing in mind that applications such as IRI Impact are just beginning to mature to the point of fully meeting business user and process requirements.

Assessment

CPG manufacturers and retailers that have not invested strategically in information management and analytics for business intelligence (BI) are facing challenges today that they can no longer ignore. Increased consumer choices and the distributed global supply chain have made it more difficult for operational managers and analysts to make the right decisions, particularly since many of these business users still depend on spreadsheets and presentations shared through e-mail as their decision-making support systems. This situation provides an opportunity for IRI and others to address with a new generation of services and solutions.

CPG manufacturers and retailers have told us they want to improve operational performance at the brand, category and product levels. IRI’s new Liquid Data service responds to this desire by bringing together large volumes of point-of-sale, consumer panel, media and market data in a uniform, easily accessible manner – a delivery mode we call analytics as a service.

The new platform continues IRI’s history of finding innovative methods to provide information to CPG retailers and manufacturers. However, to be successful, IRI must ensure that the capabilities of Liquid Data will be able to be customized – personalized – to satisfy the needs of a range of business user roles, from executives to account field teams working with retailers on categories and promotion. This will require embedding activities and processes into the application to enable users to track progress toward expected goals and outcomes. If IRI can expand the applications like Impact that use Liquid Data to provide these capabilities, it will be able to satisfy a broad set of needs, and will benefit correspondingly.

One of the challenges of selling integrated analytics as a service is that IRI will have to address its customers’ needs to integrate additional data (about stores or consumers, for example) used to make key decisions and collaborate internally or with partners. IRI will have to tailor its applications not only to support research by analysts but also to highlight insights that matter and to propose actions for improvement. Finally, companies’ increasing emphasis on collaboration and sharing of information and analytics will force IRI to support information hubs as well. These represent challenges for a hosted service offering.

As part of the process of reengineering IRI for these new offerings, the company last fall named a new CEO, John Freeland, who comes from salesforce.com and Accenture, and in March a new head of global retail operations as well, Thomas Peterson, from IBM. In 2007 it also appointed a set of division presidents whose charter is to increase the effectiveness of execution. While such organizational changes were needed to make IRI competitive in this new analytics as a service market, the company needs as well to build out its capability to help organizations understand how to use the information they derive from analytic technology to advance their operational and financial performance.

Market Impact

IRI Liquid Data is an on-demand analytics platform and new series of applications meant to help CPG and retail organizations make smarter decisions about their markets and consumers. IRI’s long-time competitor The Nielsen Company also offers an analytics as a service package called Answers and has announced its intention to expand the offering by bringing the Cognos BI products into future releases. The challenge for IRI in marketing Liquid Data is not to convince executives or market research departments, which understand the issues, but rather to convince operational and business decision-makers in management and line managers in brand, product and category areas – those that would benefit from these capabilities – of their need for the new product. Because IT influences BI and information management initiatives, IRI will also need to incorporate into its strategy an understanding of the growing numbers both of analytics competitors and of horizontal technology suppliers who deliver analytics tools to business units and IT. IRI has for years advanced the market with tools to address analytics and data management, but it now must better articulate the value of businesses investing in its new platform and set of software offerings.

Recommendation

The increasingly effective use of analytics and information has been critical for the evolving success of CPG manufacturers and retailers. IRI Liquid Data offers a new next step in unifying volumes of information and improving collaboration. Organizations that are looking for an integrated analytics and information approach from IRI and are tired of the internal delays they’ve experienced in getting actionable intelligence from research and IT teams should examine Liquid Data. IRI’s new suite of Impact applications is a first step in enabling businesses to utilize the value of the Liquid Data platform, but the company will need to improve the adaptability of the applications to specific processes and sets of information. Nonetheless, Ventana Research believes that this new release is a critical step forward for IRI in bringing value to customers that utilize consumer and market information to guide business decisions.

About the Author

Mark is responsible for the overall direction of Ventana Research, and drives the global performance management research agenda, which covers both business and technology areas. He researches the specific areas of Workforce Performance Management and Business Process Management. He is also the Director of the Intelligent Business Performance Management Conference and the community editor of IntelligentBPM.com, the industry's first independent forum for information, news, and discussion about business performance management. An industry veteran with more than 17 years of industry experience in business and technology, before founding Ventana Research, Mark worked at companies including SAP, META Group, Oracle and IRI Software. Mark can be contacted at mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com.