The Enterprise Mobility Ecosystem Map

The Enterprise Mobility Ecosystem Map published by Kinvey attempts to make sense of the ownership and acquisitions rapidly taking place within the mobile backend providers.  Platforms for authorization, payments, location services and software development kits (SDKs).

Enterprise mobility is a classic IT disruptor. It’s the kind of disruptor that companies like IBM, Oracle and VMware, SAP, Salesforce, etc. were built on. It may look like a peripheral part of IT infrastructure now, but since mobile will be the primary access point to apps and data for many enterprises, many — if not most — new apps are going to be “mobile first.” Thus, the entire IT infrastructure is going to have to become very mobile friendly, very quickly, or else risk becoming a legacy platform.

As a consequence, major IT vendors are partnering with or acquiring companies throughout the mobile stack. Market consolidation and investments have taken place in MDM, API Management, cloud and handset markets. To visualize this activity, we’ve produced the Enterprise Mobile Ecosystem map below.

A network map visualization like this can help companies figure out where their business plays, and how other company acquisitions around them may impact their business.  I like that the design is purely informational, and doesn’t add a lot of extra data or information to the design.  The message is all about the connections, and doesn’t include things like the size of the companies or the value of the acquisitions.  This keeps the infographic focused on telling one story really well.

I would recommend using the company logos in the subway map style design to make it faster and easier for the audience to recognize the companies involved.  It’s much harder for the readers to read all of the company names in text to find the companies they recognize.

The Pac-man icons are a nice touch to indicate the direction of ownership or acquisition.

Hungry Tech Giants

Hungry Tech Giants is a cool infographic from Simply Business that is both zoomable and interactive!  To put them into context, the design visualizes 15 years of tech company acquisitions by Apple, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, And Facebook.

2013 was a busy year for tech acquisitions.

With competition in the tech space heating up, Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook collectively executed 65 acquisitions in 2013 alone.

Yahoo was the biggest acquirer of 2013, buying a total of 25 companies following the hiring of its new CEO, Marissa Meyer.

Although Meyer is best known for her acquisition of Tumblr, the majority of her deals have bought engineering talent in an effort to build Yahoo as a serious challenger to Google.

Apple also had their biggest ever year for acquisitions in 2013, with ten purchases in total.

To see all of the acquisitions in detail, please visit our interactive microsite.

Each acquisition is appropriately placed on the timeline, and shown as a circle sized to match the total acquisition price.  Solid circles shown known prices, and open circles are not sized because the acquisition amount was never released publicly.  The circles are also color-coded to represent the different categories.

The interactivity allows you to select which categories to show, and when you hover over any particular acquisition, the acquired company name is shown with a link to the press release or news story announcing the acquisition.

The zooming controls allow you to adjust the date range shown, which helps identify many of the overlapping circles.  Clicking on the company logos on the left also brings up the data table which shows all of the known values, dates and includes the links to the press releases.  A very good way to establish credibility and make your data sources transparent.

The overall design is meant to be very detailed and allow the audience to dig in and explore the data.  At the macro level, the infographic clearly puts Facebook’s $19B acquisition of WhatsApp into context as the largest tech acquisition of all time!

Found on TechCrunch and Cult of Mac!

The Genealogy of Automobile Companies

A brand new infographic poster designed by Larry Gormley at HistoryShots.com!  The Genealogy of U.S. Automobile Companies visualizes over 100 years or corporate history of car company mergers, acquisitions and closures.

A flowing history of more than 100 automobile companies across the complete time span of the automobile industry. From 1900 to 1925 over 3,300 organizations were formed to produce automobiles in the United States. In 1910 alone 400 new startups entered the industry. Most attempts lasted less than two years. While car sales exploded (from 1910 to 2010 US sales rose from 200,000 to 11.5 million cars) the strongest entrepreneurs bought out rivals and combined forces. Today, ten companies account for about 90% of all US automobile sales.

This graphic uncovers and explains how the industry was created and how it arrived at its present form. At the core is a full genealogy of over 100 companies from the Big Five to the small defunct companies. Folded into the genealogy is the relative market share of US sales for each company.

The Big Five car companies have unique colors, and all of the other companies are color-coded into categories of he trest of the Top 20, defunct companies and other interesting or famous companies.  The thickness of the lines change over time to represent market share.

You can buy a copy of the 38” x 23” poster for $29.95 over at HistoryShots.com

Thanks to Larry for sending in the link!  Great design!

The Genealogy of U.S. Airlines

A new infographic poster designed by Larry Gormley at HistoryShots.com!  The Genealogy of U.S. Airlines visualizes over 90 years or corporate history of airline mergers, acquisitions and closures.  Over 100 different airlines have consolidated down the seven shown still in existence today. 

The carriers are color coded and line widths represent market share for any particular year.

Over its short history, the US airline industry has experienced many dynamic phases of expansion and consolidation. From its origins in the 1920s, when air mail carriers started to transport passengers, to the creation (with the not so gentle prodding of the government) of the Big Four (American, United, TWA, and Eastern), from the rise of the local service carriers to deregulation and the most recent wave of mergers and acquisitions, the industry continues to fascinate both the casual traveler and the aviation buff.

The purpose of this graphic is to uncover and explain how the industry was created and how it arrived at its present form. At the core is a full genealogy of over 100 US airlines from the major airlines to the small local service carriers. Folded into the genealogy is the relative market share of passenger traffic for each airline. This allows the viewer to understand how the industry was controlled for many decades by the Big Four and how this dominance was quickly replaced by a number of other airlines.

You can buy a copy of the poster for $29.95 over at HistoryShots.com

Converging Flight Paths - Airline Merger Infographic

I really like this one from the NYTimes.com.  Converging Flight Paths visualizes the airline mergers over time from 1975 to today, but also shows the “Domestic share of total passengers flown each year.”

The deregulation of the airline industry in 1978 led to a wave of mergers that continues to this day. But even as the legacy carriers have been consolidating and growing, they have been losing market share to low-cost carriers. Two of them, SouthWest and AirTran, have just agreed to merge and carried the most domestic passengers in 2009 combined. But if international passengers were included, this ranking would be greatly rearranged.

By KARL RUSSELL/The New York Times.  Sources: American Transport Association (passenger data 1975-89); Bureau of Transportation Statistics (passenger data 1990-2009)

Link from Elliott Ng on Twitter.