The venture capitalists have honed in on “business analytics” as an area of prospective opportunity. This may be an indicator of attention and capital shifting to the enterprise’s increasingly coveted intellisphere.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based US Venture Partners has invested 80% of its software-focused capital in these types of deals. "Traditional analytics vendors put out a report, and getting a report is great, but you have to know what you're looking for," say Tim Connors, general partner at USVP. "What we're funding is different. This is not just a report to give executives to make decisions; it delivers the decisions just by dropping in the software."

One of USVP's portfolio company CEOs compares it to the evolution of the map. "You had street addresses and then maps and now you have systems in the car that tell you how to get places and avoid problems," says Daphne Carmeli, CEO of Metreo Inc.. "The next level may be giving recommendations based on where you've been and what you like. Real analytics isn't about data; it's about predicting behavior."

All we have to do now is marry all this extraordinary inventiveness in analytical technology with real-world insight into the challenges that today’s companies face as they focus on customer relationships. The more closely we look, the more mysterious and unmapped we find the geography that lies between companies and their customers.