June 23, 2006
Notes from the Second Annual Text Analytics (formerly Text Mining) Summit
Thursday morning at the Text Analytics Summit featured, among other things, one excellent panel, a couple of lively and interesting presentations, and the usual tedious discussion of “What do we call this technology area anyway?” Lots of airtime went to industry stars such as Olivier Jouve (SPSS), Todd Wakefield (Attensity), Ramana Rao (Inxight), and Mary Crissey (SAS). There also was a gratifying repetition from the front of the room of the statement “Curt is right”, so as of when I’m writing these notes (midday) I’m happy, even if Ramana somehow neglected to join that chorus …
Repeated themes and messages included:
- This technology is practical for a lot of apps. Really, it’s practical. In particular, the vendors feel they’ve done a good job now of separating the technology from the ontology implementation. It was even claimed, sort of, that the technology was a commodity (but see below).
- Growth hasn’t continued on the rocketship trajectory it was on a year ago. It couldn’t. But it’s been very healthy by any other standards. (Actually, SAS later told me they were still growing at the old pace.)
- A typical text mining vendor has 25-30% of its revenue in services. I.e., this really is a license business, unlike a few years ago when it was focused on custom government (defensive/security) applications.
- Like analytics vendors in general, text mining/analytics vendors are selling a lot on an application basis. More than I think they should be, actually. A number of people think that text analytics companies will be bought by various other kinds of software company, to be rolled into their general product lines.
- Nobody is doing anything about the platform advances I think are necessary. However, when prodded, they admit that something like that is needed, and the technology really isn’t finished or a commodity after all. But some other company should do it, because they aren’t going to. Arggh.
I’ve only slept one night in the past three, so I’ll stop here and blog more about the conference later.
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