On Wednesday, May 2, IBM announced its agreement to acquire analytics industry veteran Tealeaf. You can read the official press release here. The financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed, and the deal will conclude in Q3 2012, following a customary closing period. IBM anticipates that all Tealeaf staff will continue with the company. Tealeaf, a private company, was founded in 1999 as a spin-off of tech giant SAP. Tealeaf is best known for its interaction analysis — or session replay — software.

Forrester has just published the second installment in our research series on digital intelligence, titled The Road To Digital Intelligence. This piece is the follow-up to Welcome To The Era Of Digital Intelligence, which introduced Forrester's vision for the next stage in the evolution of digital analytics.

I've been very busy recently speaking about and socializing the concept of digital intelligence. The response from Forrester clients and presentation attendees has been extremely enthusiastic. And while there is general agreement on the concept of digital intelligence, savvy practitioners recognize that it's not a quick fix. Digital intelligence involves tracking complex customer interactions across touchpoints, managing massive volumes of data, and delivering actionable analysis. Ultimately, digital intelligence is an analytics strategy rather than a singular project or technology implementation.

As organizations consider shifting to the digital intelligence paradigm, two very perceptive questions arise time and time again. "The Road To Digital Intelligence" aims to address these questions and provide a launching off point for the digital intelligence journey.

Question 1: How should I think about implementing digital intelligence in my organization? 

I've never made New Year's resolutions. Well, that's not exactly true. Last week, I promised my dentist I would floss my teeth more in 2012, but that's about the extent of it. But this shouldn't be interpreted as a lack of optimism; I'm absolutely certain that 2012 will be another great year. I fully expect that this will be the year we bring gamification to big mobile data in the cloud or some other delightful confluence of buzzwords.*

Although I haven't traditionally written an annual retrospective, 2011 was a particularly interesting year for the analytics community. So I couldn't resist taking the opportunity to recap the most significant events and trends that I saw over the course of the year. I've selected a few choice items that were both meaningful in 2011 and are likely to have an ongoing impact in 2012:

1. Google Analytics Premium launches. In September, Google entered the paid web analytics market with Google Analytics Premium. The new offering takes Google Analytics' (GA) capabilities quite a bit further than the free version and introduced a new option for enterprise web analytics buyers with upgraded processing power, support, and product features. As we move into 2012, it will be really interesting to see how Google continues to develop GA Premium to close the gap with competitors and to what degree they fine-tune the commercial and support models.

The market for tag management systems is gaining momentum at an impressive rate. On the surface, tag management is a rather pedestrian topic, focusing on the occasionally arcane and frequently ugly mechanics underlying our websites. Indeed, tag management seems to be worlds apart from the current marketing zeitgeist, which often directs our attention to sexy topics such as social media, tablet computers, and gamification. But if we take a deeper view of current marketing trends, it is clear that the two are actually very closely connected. Digital marketing execution and analysis are heavily dependent on website instrumentation, which by extension benefits from enabling technologies such as tag management.

Ultimately, I think the enthusiasm for tag management systems stems from the simple fact that these solutions address very real and tangible pain points felt by nearly all companies doing business on the Web. I believe that the effective use of tag management technology and governance practices can deliver significant efficiency, performance, and financial gains. And I'm not alone. Since publishing How Tag Management Improves Web Intelligence, I've seen steady and growing interest from Forrester clients on the topic.  

For a relatively young technology segment, tag management is evolving quickly. In a matter of a just a few weeks, we've seen the tag management market take several significant steps forward:

Google changed the web analytics market forever with the introduction of Google Analytics in 2005 (for a dose of nostalgia check out Brett Crosby’s original blog post).  It was easy to use, delivered as a service, integrated with Google AdWords, and most of all it was FREE! This was revolutionary, and in the beginning it was an exciting way to democratize analytics, giving companies of all sizes access to tools that had traditionally been the domain of large, well funded corporations. It’s no surprise that in terms of sheer adoption, Google Analytics became – and still is – the most popular web analytics tool on Earth, serving hundreds of thousands of businesses.

But then something interesting happened: Google Analytics took on a life of its own. Strictly speaking, Google Analytics was not the leading offering in terms of features and functionality, and Google didn’t even offer direct services or support. So what accounts for its success?

• Community. Google cultivated a large, active, and cooperative community of users, bolstered by strong online resources and their base of certified partners.
• Ease of use. Google innovated in usability, making analytics accessible – even appealing – for non-analysts and marketers.
• Enterprise penetration. Google Analytics gradually found its way into the enterprise as a secondary tool – sometimes by design, sometimes not! – for marketing applications and audit or backup purposes.