Today, SAP and NetBase announced that SAP will resell NetBase solutions as the SAP® Social Media Analytics application by NetBase.

What does this mean?

According to the announcement: “SAP Social Media Analytics is a cloud-based solution that is able to process more than 95 million social media posts per day. It uses an advanced natural language processing (NLP) engine to read and categorize each one of these posts according to the opinions, emotions and behaviors that the market is expressing. “

NetBase is a SaaS social media insight and analytics platform that contains one year of social media data. This data consists of blogs, tweets, newsfeeds, and other Web content. NetBase combines deep Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytics with a content aggregation service and a reporting capability. The product provides analysis around likes/dislikes, emotions, reasons why, and behaviors. For example, whereas some social media services might interpret the sentence, “Listerine kills germs because it hurts” as either a negative or neutral statement, the NetBase technology uses a semantic data model to understand not only that this is a positive statement, but also the reason it is positive.

The platform is currently used by hundreds of corporate customers, and was developed in partnership with five of the top 10 consumer packaged goods companies, including Coca-Cola and Kraft. I have used NetBase for competitive intelligence, most notably when I was putting together the Victory Index for Predictive Analytics. The platform is quite robust and easy to use.

 The idea is that an end-user could do his or her social media analysis in the NetBase solution and then, using an API provided with the solution, export data into Business Objects to further analyze it. Here are a few screen shots I pulled from the company’s online demo that illustrate this:

Step 1: In this simple example, say an end-user is trying to understand the buzz around a specific product (in this case a PC product). He or she utilizes the NetBase system to understand some of the key opinions, passions, and sentiment regarding this brand.

Step 2: Once the end user has done some analysis, he or she can export the results of the analysis to SAP Business Objects. The illustration below shows the kind of data that is exported. In this case, there is information about attributes and emotions about the product. These values also have a sentiment indicator associated with them.

This data can then be visually displayed and analyzed in SAP Business Objects.  In the example below, the insights are displayed on an IPad.

In addition to simply displaying information in SAP Business Objects, the plan moving forward is to be able to operationalize this data throughout workflows that are part of an enterprise business process. I imagine that SAP HANA will enter the picture too at some point.

I am glad to see that SAP is partnering with NetBase on this solution. It is a good time for SAP to incorporate social media analysis into its products. As social media analysis becomes more mainstream, SAP customers are, no doubt, asking for a solution that can work with SAP products. While SAP bought Inxight, a text analytics vendor, a number of years ago, it does not have the social media historical data or the SaaS business around it. This partnership seems like a good solution in the short term. I will be interested to learn more about how SAP will incorporate social media analysis into enterprise workflows. Certainly NetBase will benefit from the huge SAP installed base. I suspect that SAP customers will be intrigued by this new partnership.