PWC Enters Integrated Analytics Arena

PricewaterhouseCoopers already anticipates winding up its fiscal year in a month with $400 million in data mining-related revenue, but now the consulting firm says it wants to move the practice to another level.

PWC, based here, last week introduced a solution set called iAnalytics,its sixth strategic solution set,which it plans to take to enterprises looking for ways to become more competitive by integrating information from various enterprise applications, analyzing it and pushing pertinent information to front-line workers.

"This will take data mining from being an application used by five statisticians in a room somewhere to really making data mining available to the masses," says Mike Schroeck, managing partner for global data warehousing and iAnalytics solution practices.

PWC's iAnalytics, or integrated analytics, solution set is currently based largely on a data integration engine from Informatica, a business analytics software developer, but Schroeck says PWC will eventually bring in one or two vendor partners for each layer of its iAnalytics solution.

The PWC and Informatica relationship, however, goes beyond a typical integrator-vendor partnership. A little more than a year ago, Informatica gave PWC $30 million in stock in exchange for some of PWC's vertical-market and business knowledge. Specifically, PWC has supplied some of its custom-build data warehousing code and consultants to aid Informatica in building supply-chain analytics and HR analytics applications.

"What's interesting to me is that PWC has this relationship with Informatica, and that the PWC expertise will eventually find its way into Informatica software," says Henry Morris, an IDC analyst. "It is the idea of getting this knowledge in a package that was repeatable."

Bart Foster, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Informatica, says PWC and Informatica have similar visions for integrated analytics. Typical business applications today involve a small group of analysts who have access to the information, he says, but "we think there's a whole other world out there--95 percent of white-collar workers--who are interested in getting consistent information."

Foster says PWC's iAnalytics practice is unique in that it envisions broad distribution of data, cross-enterprise integration of data and the prepackaging of solutions for various applications and markets.

"As they got into this market and started to think that this was bigger than just data warehousing---that this was something they could build a whole practice or solution set around---they came up with iAnalytics," Foster says.

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