Umbria Acquired by J.D. Power

Today, Umbria announced its acquisition by J. D. Power, a global marketing information firm. This is the third major acquisition in the social media mining/analysis space (BuzzMetrics by Nielson, Cymfony by TNS Media) in a little over 12 months. Congratulations to Umbria!

Navigating integration and growth can be extremely challenging. When being absorbed by a larger entity there can be pressure to focus on internal customers and plugging in to existing sales models - this may come at the expense of maintaining position in the market.

Given J. D. Power's business, I suspect that Umbria will have a relatively smooth transition as they provide a very complimentary feature set.

About J. D. Power:

Established in 1968, J.D. Power and Associates is a global marketing information firm that conducts independent and unbiased surveys of customer satisfaction, product quality and buyer behavior. Today, the firm’s services include industry-wide syndicated studies; proprietary (commissioned) tracking studies; media studies; forecasting; and training services, as well as business operations analyses, and consultancies on customer satisfaction trends. On April 1, 2005, J.D. Power and Associates became a business unit of the McGraw-Hill Companies.

In some ways, these three acquisitions change the landscape somewhat. With some amount of attention being diverted internally, there will be a bit more space for the competition to push forward - perhaps an interesting time to keep an eye on Visible Technologies.

Comments

[Nick]

Hi,

Congrats to Umbria. I'm doing Biz Dev for Collective Intellect, another player in this space. In fact, we're just down the street from Umbria in Boulder.

Thanks for keeping an eye on all of us crazy social media companies. It's going to be a fun race for the rest of us.

Nick Sowden