Just over a year ago analyst firm RedMonk launched RedMonk Analytics, an effort to productize some of the data sets that the firm relies on. Since companies ranging from small analyst firms like RedMonk to large global consulting companies like Accenture are trying to figure out how to productize services, I thought it would be interesting to talk to RedMonk co-founder Stephen O’Grady about the first year of RedMonk Analytics.

(there’s a corollary trend in which product companies are starting to offer more services, but we’ll discuss that another time)

O’Grady says the genesis of the idea came from the fact they often used their own Web analytics as data points to support an argument. For example, O’Grady was making the case to Sun that there needed to be improvements to the shell in Solaris. Sun didn’t think it was that big a deal, but O’Grady was able to show the many search queries that led searchers to a post he did on that very subject. That search data helped make the case that users were unhappy with the shell and wanted improvements. O’Grady and his fellow analysts realized they had a lot of data that wasn’t being put to good use and decided to create a self-service data portal based on its own internal sources of data along with a few external sources.

A year in, Red Monk Analytics has about a dozen subscribers, using 1-50 seats each. O’Grady says this has been enough to pay for the initial development, which is enough for the team to further invest in it.

O’Grady says the firm has had some trouble helping clients see the value in the data and how to apply it, but the that the biggest problem has been in dealing with licensing data from external sources. O’Grady actually delved into this in a blog post today. The trouble seems to be that many would be data providers don’t have the legal resources to create one-off arrangements with data resellers like RedMonk, and there’s not sufficient market demand to allocate the legal resources to create a blanket licensing arrangement.

Instead, RedMonk has refocused on mining the public Web, making many of the same data sets – such as mentions of particular technologies on places like Twitter and Hacker News – the firm uses for analysis available to customers. However, RedMonk does have an agreement with Black Duck to provide various data about open source development, such as the number of commits in different forges.

Overall, O’Grady says the project has been “reasonably successful.” It’s a great example to look at as services companies try to build out new products and services based on data (there’s a corollary trend in which product companies are starting to offer more services, but we’ll discuss that another time). As the data-as-a-service market matures you can expect even more companies to get into the business of brokering data and providing self-service tools for making sense of it all.