March 26, 2007

Clarabridge takes on Attensity

Text mining newbie Clarabridge gave me the all-too-customary “Please let us brief you, but then don’t write about it for a while” routine. Now that it’s OK to post, what I’m up for offering is a few salient points in bullet form.

The closest analogy to what Clarabridge does is Attensity’s new(ish) strategy – extract “facts” from documents and dump them into a relational database management system. In particular, Clarabridge and Attensity alike make the case “Our categorization is more flexible because it’s applied only after the extraction happens.”
Clarabridge’s sweet spot is extracting user opinions from short documents. E.g., the customer uses cases they talk about are customer feedback forms, public blog postings, etc. about A. hotels and B. consumer software products.
Clarabridge has a strong business intelligence mentality, describing the product as “ETL for unstructured data.” But then, it’s spun out of a BI consultancy that itself was founded by Microstrategy veterans.
Clarabridge uses a different database schema than Attensity. Attensity’s fact-relationship network (FRN) is basically just two thin, long tables. Clarabridge, however, uses a Microstrategy-like star schema, in which different kinds of things that you can tokenize correspond to different dimensions.

Frankly, if somebody wants an alternative to the Attensity/Teradata/Business Objects partnership they could do worse than talk with Clarabridge.

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