M-Brain: Information to Actionable Insights for Daily Decisions

Joakim Nyberg, COO at M-Brain says, “Making decisions is easier when you have the relevant data when you need it.” M-Brain’s job is, “finding the relevant information for the relevant people at the relevant time.” But how do you do that in a world where Big Data adds 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data every day (and a quintillion is 1018)? M-Brain—a company servicing more than 50,000 corporate decision-makers around the globe—has its own powerful Big Data harvesting and analytics technology, which is automated, and on top of which sits a human intelligence layer–so Nyberg describes the model as “a hybrid”.

It is a corporate hybrid, too, and fitting it into a category is not easy. It is a media intelligence company; but it is also a market and competitive intelligence firm. The solutions portfolio is segmented (though Nyberg has plans to combine both major offerings), and the client-base is also segmented. Target customers can be in any business, but targeted users are communications and marketing professionals, intelligence professionals as well as top management in large global companies with a variety of intelligence needs.

“It’s no longer enough,” says Nyberg, “to know how your communications efforts have paid off or how your marketing campaign has worked after it comes to an end. The world moves too fast today. Of course, you do need to know how effective your communications efforts have been, and we provide that insight, but you also need to know what’s happening in your industry, and you need to know it in real-time. What trends are emerging? What are your competitors doing? What are people saying about you?” On top of all that are the questions M-Brain’s clients are not asking themselves, because they do not even know the questions exist–but an opportunity can slip by and vanish before anyone even knows it was available.

The information is all out there, in those quintillions of Big Data. For most companies, the problem isn’t the existence of the information, but finding the relevant information and making sense out of it. And that’s what its clients rely on M-Brain to do. The company has a Web harvester operating in 68 different languages extracting relevant information, which they can present to the client as it stands, or with interpretation added by M-Brain’s own analysts. Checking relevance means understanding the client’s needs, which is always the starting point. “We have to get to know our clients and understand them: what they need, what they do, how they operate. That enables us to build a solution that is just right for them. We can deliver the information they want in a number of ways; we have automatic tools they can pick from, they can have their own dashboard, and increasingly we are using visualization and combining that with a stress on mobility. When our clients are on the way to work, it’s good for them to be able to use their phone or tablet to catch up on the campaign, the crisis, or just what’s happening in their industry. It’s about hitting the ground running. On top of this, we have top analysts around the world who actually understand our clients’ businesses and are able to make the connection between the analysed information and its actual relevance and meaning for their business. We can do deep-dive analyses on any specified issue where the client needs a deeper understanding of the implications something might have on their business.”

CTO Kimmo Valtonen and Nyberg believe that the core technology they have developed is not only unique, but also unmatched. It is scalable and it is efficient. Right now, besides the services M-Brain provides, the two most used software tools are Intelligence Plaza and M-Adaptive. Intelligence Plaza is a platform that presents a variety of kinds of data, both external and internal, for a client organization that might have hundreds of platform users and varying intelligence needs across different divisions and functions.

M-Adaptive helps clients make their own analysis on things they want to understand better. They can see how their own company is perceived, monitor what their competitors are doing, discover trends in the industry and build their own situational awareness dashboards from a rich set of components. M-Adaptive uses M-Brain’s back-end Big Data technology, but is managed by the customer the way the customer wants it.

Joakim Nyberg sees good prospects for growth in the Asia-Pacific region. “The more integrated and digitized the world becomes the more information is generated; the more information there is, the more companies need the kind of services we offer. What we have created is a top-level management solution portfolio for decision-makers. Demand is strong, and it’s going to get stronger,” he concludes.