UNVEILING THE ASCENT INDEX

Today we’re very excited to announce the first iteration of the Ascent Index. As we pride ourselves on spotting and helping shape the latest trends in enterprise technology, the Ascent Index will provide you (and us) with a real-time snapshot into which topics are creating the most buzz in enterprise IT. We’re using an impressive piece of technology to track every tweet, news item, blog post, video, image, and any other communication vehicle you can think of, and delivering the results here on a regular basis.

We’re all students of the evolution of technology, and we’re constantly inspired by the entrepreneurs we’ve partnered with who have challenged the status quo, defied legacy approaches, and revolutionized the way business is conducted. Currently we’re following several tech sectors very closely, and we work with entrepreneurs in those sectors who are leading the innovation. The index will monitor those areas.

Out of all the enterprise IT terms we searched in the last two week period (April 23 until today), there was one that rose high above the rest in terms of social mentions – big data. During the two-week period there were close to 35,000 social mentions, with an average of 2,863 a day.

We’re also tracking sentiment on the Index, so we can see the positive mentions far outweighed the negative (14,863-1,932). Much of the negative pick-up came from an article from The Verge titled, “Is Big Data leading us to financial and mental bankruptcy?”

The high volume of mentions we’re seeing for big data in social channels doesn’t surprise us. There is a vast market of solutions to the problems that organizations have encountered with the explosion of data in the last decade. We’re working with several portfolio companies with big data offerings. We believe the best companies offer actual big data solutions, and not just technologies – they pull data from numerous sources, integrate it all together, and then present it as a platform that many different applications or analyses can run on top of. ClickFox is a good example of this; their solution can continuously compile interaction data from many disparate sources and provide a rich and ongoing profile of customers across all channels.

Additionally, some of the most powerful big data solutions we have seen are industry-specific. They gather comprehensive data sets from across an industry using many different sources, and then integrate, filter and analyze it based on their own experience in that particular industry. CargoMetrics is an example of such a big data offering, one that has the depth to produce rich new insights.

We are excited to see what we uncover as we track the trends in enterprise technology and share these insights with you.