Tom Blomfield was named one of the Top 5 Entrepreneurs Under 30 in Europe; in addition to developing for the Ruby programming language and co-founding GoCardless, he recently wrote a column for TechCrunch about “x-as-a-service” startups. He notes that tech startups are taking advantage of “more specialized and niche services” to get themselves off the ground faster and easier than ever before; he then compares the trend to the brick-and-mortar world, where it is significantly harder to access outsourced services without size to back you up. Here is his take on these differences:

Yesterday it was announced that Dell acquired StatSoft, a 30+ year old business analytics software provider. Yes, you read that correctly. 30+ years old. That means that this innovative analytics company existed before the Internet, before mobile, before SaaS, before big data…

So, why would Dell acquire an old analytics company? It’s no secret that big data and advanced analytics is the hot market to be in right now. Clearly one motive for a hardware-laden company like Dell is to continue to buy recurring revenue streams and nice margins, both of which they get from StatSoft. However, there is more going on here just below the surface. StatSoft, though old and not entirely innovative, has what very few companies in the market today have: a predictive platform. And, software vendors with an actual platform for building and deploying predictive analytics are a rare breed indeed.