Stepping into the social media analytics market, SAP will re-sell NetBase’s on-demand software with plans to integrate it with several SAP BusinessObjects products and CRM modules, the vendor announced today.

The on-demand software gives customers access to a database that draws in 95 million social media posts daily from Twitter, Facebook, news feeds, blogs and more, and stores this information for a year. By making this information available via Google-like dashboards, customers can extract trends and get a handle on customer feedback, competitive offerings and more, according to SAP.

The real value in social media analytics, of course, comes in using it to understand the business, says Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst with Forrester Research. SAP’s plans to allow customers to use SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase, as the application will be called, to leverage unstructured data with the structured data in their enterprise systems could be extremely valuable for its customers.

“Most of the tools on the market are standalone social media listening or modeling tools,” Hofer-Shall says. Out-of-the-box integration capabilities would put SAP “ahead of the curve.”

NetBase’s software is already in use by some marquee SAP customers, such as Coca-Cola and Kraft. The software is on-demand, running in the datacenter of cloud-services provider SoftLayer.

For those who have seen “SAP’s Sentiment Analysis” software in action, SAP’s Byron Banks, VP, Business Analytics Solution Marketing, says this is different—more than a simple text- and data-processing platform. Sentiment Analysis is based on SAP Data Services and requires more development and customization time. On the other hand, SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase is out-of-the-box and optimized to cull through and help make sense of data from social media channels.

“We are working with NetBase so that a customer doesn’t have to take tools and do it themselves,” Banks says, including out-of-the-box integrations for competitive analysis, sales execution, service management, risk management, and measuring market effectiveness.

SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase includes a web services API, according to SAP, and plans are already in place for several integrations with SAP software, including the entire SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, BI OnDemand and Data Services. There are plans for integration with CRM modules and Sales OnDemand. In turn, integrations are planned for SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management, Sustainability Performance Management, Trade Promotion Effectiveness Analysis, and StreamWork.

Buyers look for two big things when seeking social media software: ease of use and actionable data quality, Hofer-Shall says. It has to be fun to look at and have a lot of engineering under the hood that gets rid of spam, finds the relevant insight, and gives users the tools to learn something from it.

“We want it to be easy, and it has to be easy to find the information we’re looking for,” are the desires of buyers, Hofer-Shall says . “NetBase does both those well.”

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