HG Data and EverString Join Forces to Offer Improved Customer Analytics

HG Data, a provider of competitive intelligence for installed technologies, Tuesday announced a partnership with EverString, a predictive analytics platform for companies aiming to better engage customers.

EverString's software as a service (SaaS) platform relies on machine learning and natural language processing to help sales and marketing teams identify, classify, and target prospects.

HG Data tracks more than 1,700 technology vendors and more than 5,000 tech products, including the cloud, CRM systems, open sources, and a growing list of other technologies. The company compiles information gathered from the countless unstructured documents available online and offline—such as press releases, case studies, job postings, blog posts, and other miscellaneous documents—to create records of the installed technologies used at businesses to help B2B providers run their campaigns.

Under the agreement, EverString's algorithms and predictive lead generation capabilities will interact with HG Data's resources and enable clients to more effectively reach out to contacts and maximize sales potential. By scouring CRM and marketing records and connecting them with various sources across the Web, users will have the opportunity to better predict prospect conversions.

"With the addition of HG Data's unique dataset of installed technologies," said EverString CEO Vincent Yang in a statement, "EverString is adding the deepest and broadest set of installed technologies data to our algorithms, which further enhances our ability to prioritize existing sales leads and identify completely new high-potential prospects."

Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research, points out that an effective combination of data and analytic algorithms is a step in the right direction. "Traditionally data companies [haven't had] good algorithms," Mueller says, "so we will see more partnerships between data providers and analytical algorithm providers, as both are needed for great analytics. The ultimate value is created when those two are embedded with the business application."

For both EverString and HG Data, the partnership is a strategic one. "Everyone wins," Mark Godley, chief revenue officer at HG Data, says. "EverString wins because they'll be able to build better models for their clients; HG Data wins because [we'll] be able to go into a market segment that has not embraced us as of yet."

The market Godley is referring to is that of small and medium-sized business (SMBs), which he claims have traditionally shied away from HG Data's services due to its formidable size and price tag. With the partnership, HG Data hopes to offer smaller clients a more practical entry point into predictive analytics. "[Cobbling] together three or four different technologies and [figuring] it out in-house is just a daunting task.... We're integrating technologies behind the scenes which prevents their need to do so, [which] has both resource and cost implications."

Mueller says that while certain SMBs stand to gain, they'd also better be familiar with data and algorithms. "The majority will benefit when the CRM SaaS vendors make [data as a service] and analytics mainstream, embedded into the respective business application."