On Monday, the SDL acquisition of Alterian was officially announced. I will remain the head of the Social Intelligence Division for SDL, helping to roll out our solutions globally.

This is an exciting time because of the tremendous assets that SDL has within its family.

At Alterian Social, we’ve evolved our Social Media solutions beyond just social monitoring and listening to encompass analytics and insights. We’ve been on the leading edge of social monitoring and engagement by integrating social insights to answer critical business questions for our customers. We’ve validated the inherent advantages of the social data set — its authenticity, near real-time access, its predictive nature, its scalability and much more.

Now, we can integrate further with SDL’s world-class language translation capabilities with our social media solutions. We can now offer better insights and intelligence globally across cultures and languages. In addition, we will now be able to provide a Social Intelligence Framework that will allow analysis of social, campaign management, email and other data sets in one business intelligence environment. Eventually, I can see that within this environment the opportunity to truly link customer information from these different data sets to offer better customer experience to consumers.

SDL wants  to provide relevant content when and where people want them. Social Intelligence obviously fits well into that.

At new beginnings, we are all allowed to dream. But certain beginnings allow for bigger dreams. My dream is to be a disruptive force in traditional markets (i.e. BI, Market Research), and we’re better armed now than ever to make that a reality.