HG Insights Acquires Intricately

Technology Intelligence vendor HG Insights acquired fellow data vendor Intricately.  The acquisition provides HG Insights with global cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data, “adding to HG’s market-leading optimization of the world’s top technology brands’ Go-To-Market.”

The entire Intricately team has joined HG Insights, including CEO Michael Pollack and CTO Fima Leshinsky.  Pollack assumed the role of EVP of Market Innovation, and Leshinsky was named an SVP of Product.

HG Insights’ NLP gathers technology installation and spend intelligence for eleven million global companies, capturing 96% of the world’s total IT spend and intelligence on over 15,600 installed products.

“We started Intricately to provide decision-makers with actionable data and insights they could use to plot a course through the ever-expanding Cloud universe.  At the time, we saw a world with individuals relying on gut instincts, teams making ‘best guesses,’ and organizations making big bets on circumspect data.  We started this business with the goal of making the unknown known.  Our vision was, and has always been, to be the authoritative source of truth for digital product adoption, usage, and spend.”

Intricately Founders Fima Leshinsky and Michael Pollack

Intricately’s proprietary sensor network gathers cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data for seven million global businesses across 21,000 cloud offerings.  Data are collected from over 150 global Internet points of presence, helping Intricately map digital infrastructure.  Its insights are delivered via an API, integrations, data snapshots, and web applications.

“Intricately provides unique and actionable insights that enable cloud sellers to increase velocity by focusing on the highest potential opportunities,” said Pollack.  “As the workforces of global companies become increasingly distributed, cloud spend and product adoption have become key indicators when assessing potential buyers’ likelihood of purchasing and deploying new products.  Intricately’s intelligence, now part of HG Insights, is uniquely positioned to lead the market on this trend.”

Intricately Cloud Intelligence

Intricately’s customers include the top three cloud companies.  In addition, the acquisition provides “real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack.”

“Now, with the addition of Intricately, we can provide real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack to provide richer insights for better decisions and faster results,” said HG Insights CEO Elizabeth Cholawsky.  “Our customers have come to rely on HG Insights as an indispensable input into their most strategic decisions such as market sizing, whitespace analysis, and territory planning as well as for fundamental activities including opportunity prioritization and account-based marketing intelligence.”

HG Insights and Intricately offer complementary spend data.  HG Insights focuses on projected spend for forecasting and go-to-market planning while Intricately measures actual spend for benchmarking and plan measurement.  Combined, the companies offer “unmatched spend insights in the Cloud Market that support the full lifecycle of Plan, Optimize, and Execute to empower sales and marketing organizations.”

HG Insights listed a series of technical benefits:

  • Richer combined datasets to operationalize the planning, targeting, and messaging to prospects based on technology adoption and usage
  • Improved precision of workload volumes, estimated spends, and the related technologies running on cloud-based infrastructure
  • Expansion of insights into customer-built cloud and self-hosted applications
  • Detailed location insights providing a view into both the location of consumption and/or physical infrastructure to power hyper-focused Go-to-Market strategies
  • Real-time detection of changes to a company’s cloud application and technology strategy

Business professionals can leverage HG Insights expanded intelligence to evaluate their TAM/SAM/SOM, prioritize ABM campaigns, establish “equitable and efficient” sales territories, and determine which prospects have the highest propensity to buy.  In addition, sales reps can identify prospects evaluating other vendors or shifting their usage patterns, signals that an account is at risk.

“With this new intelligence in its offering, HG will provide game-changing insights that transform our customers’ Go-To-Market initiatives and accelerate growth,” HG Insights Product Marketing Director Darcy Moss told GZ Consulting.  “Strategy, marketing, sales, and operations teams can leverage this insight to answer critical business decisions with greater confidence.”

The addition of Intricately Cloud insights helps answer the question, “What is Coming?”

“By adding Intricately’s market-leading workload and usage data, we’ll give our customers the most detailed, unique picture available of an account’s technology strategy; not just what they have, but why they have it, how they’re using it, and ultimately, what they’re likely to do next.  It’s a competitive advantage unmatched in the market,” stated Moss.

Intricately was founded in 2014 and is based in San Francisco.  LinkedIn states that it has 54 employees, having grown its headcount by 35% in the past year and 93% over the past two.  However, its employment plateaued last November.

“At this time, we will be business as usual until the transition is completed,” stated Moss.  “This includes retaining current office locations.”

HG Insights did not disclose any size or growth details.  It also did not disclose the acquisition price. Intricately is HG Insights’ second acquisition.  In 2018, the firm acquired Pivotal IQ, a curator of IT contract and spend intelligence.

HG Insights Market Intelligence for SOM Analysis

Last month, HG Insights launched its Market Intelligence service that supports technographic market research. The analytics service supports sales, marketing, and strategy teams at B2B vendors, letting them develop account plans, segment markets, evaluate market entry, and size opportunities.

Product and strategy teams can analyze market trends, size market opportunities, and assess competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.  They can also use it to identify the Service Obtainable Market (SOM), which is the market segment size a firm can capture with its solution. As HG Insights notes in the following graphic, the SOM is a narrower definition of market potential than TAM (Total Addressable Market) and SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market).

For example, many entrenched vendors in the North American Sales Intelligence space have robust solutions and established market share.  Looking to displace LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoominfo, D&B Hoovers, and InsideView in the most mature Sales Intelligence segment would be difficult.  However, a SOM analysis would indicate that the UK is the second most mature market and that continental Europe is beginning to take off.  Thus, a product manager might focus on European content and multi-lingual capabilities (e.g., UX, event tagging, free form text translation).  Likewise, they might select niche markets such as financial services with strong compliance requirements or choose to develop functionally differentiated services (e.g., GrowFlare focused on psychographics and ICPs before being acquired by Terminus late last year).

“Without a SOM containing detailed information about competitor product installations, you’d have no way of knowing this and might decide to go to market in a region saturated by competition you have very little likelihood of displacing. Alternatively, what if you were looking at different regions or countries and wanted to identify which situations represented the best growth opportunities for your business. Again, knowing the estimated market size in revenue isn’t going to help you much. But what if you knew what companies had budgeted to spend on your category of product by region, entity, or industry?”

HG Insights VP of Global Sales Scott Smyth

“Business leaders need more than high-level market reports to make successful go-to-market decisions,” said HG Insights EVP of Product Rana Kanaan. “With our actionable market intelligence offering, we are giving our customers the ability to customize their market views by the attributes they care about most and operationalize intelligence for their revenue teams.  This allows them to allocate resources more effectively, prioritize the right product initiatives, and give their sales and marketing teams the account details they need to pursue the best opportunities.”


Scott Smyth is offering a master class on TAM/SAM/SOM on February 24th. Here is the information: