Looks like Blue Martini is going private. At a nice premium, too.

Usually when a major transaction occurs, the CEO is quoted as saying why it’s great for the company, how it will make for better products or solutions, etc. In this press release, Monte is reduced to observing that shareholders will get cash.

Every year since 1996, I’ve read that analytics is the next big investment area, after (you name it – bioinformatics, wireless, social networking, whatever). So far, I still don’t see it. Blue Martini survived longer than most companies in this space because they tightly integrated their analytics with the operational systems. For the many vendors that created analytics products that didn’t actually close the loop, the technology eventually died or got sold off.