Sysomos was among the earliest players in the enterprise social media monitoring and analytics space (together with the likes of Radian6, which was later acquired by Salesforce). Five years ago, the Toronto-based company was acquired by Marketwire, and while it continued to win big clients, things remained rather quiet around the company. Surprisingly, Sysomos regained its independence last month when it split off from Marketwire. With that split behind it — and a new CEO on board — the company is now ready to talk about its products again.
Today, it’s launching a complete redesign of its Heartbeat social media listening and monitoring service. As Jeff Cann, the company’s senior director of client experience tells me, the service now gives users more options to customize their dashboards to their liking.
“The new Heartbeat offers a beautiful and simple new user interface, featuring drag and drop widgets; fully customizable dashboards; seamless dashboard sharing fostering cross-team collaboration; and enhanced reporting capabilities,” he told me in an emailed statement.
He also noted that the team realized that the use cases for this kind of social media intelligence are becoming increasingly diverse, so having a customizable interface became a must-have for the service.
MAP, the company’s social media research and analytics service, isn’t getting a redesign but instead a new API. Cann tells me the API now gives the company’s customers access to over half a trillion social media posts covering 186 languages to power their own applications. He believes this new API will enable “an entirely new ecosystem of products to become social intelligence ready.”
Unlike other services, the MAP API can pull from Sysomos’ vast database, so users don’t have to set up pre-defined queries and then wait for the data to stream in.
“A CPG customer who makes cold and flu medication is now able to look at real-time year over year changes in the volume (not just flu and cold mentions) but of every product skew in their category,” Cann noted when I asked him for potential use cases.
“This data can then be fed alongside their existing BI tools to look at inventory and supply chain for a geo-specific region. In this instance it’s about understanding leading demand indicators and getting products on shelves quickly.”
Sysomos says it now has about 1,300 customers and saw its revenue grow more than 1,500 percent since the acquisition in 2010. The company’s new CEO, Lindsay Sparks, was previously a corporate VP at Microsoft. Maybe more importantly, though, he also sold three technology companies and — according to his official bio — “helped position four companies for IPOs or sales in the next 18 months.”
I wouldn’t be surprised then if we heard something along those lines about Sysomos in the near future, too.