Insight into Inxight
Based on a few conversations at the Text Analytics Summit this week, I’ve gotten a richer picture of what’s been going on at Inxight. Here are some highlights:
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Inxight has around 120 employees. (And while I haven’t doublechecked this, apparently Inxight has been disclosed to have $26 million revenue.)
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At least half of Inxight’s business is OEM. Only 10% or so is enterprise, with the balance being government.
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Until recently, Inxight OEMed only basic tokenization (e.g., stemming), reserving higher-level tokenization (e.g., entity extraction) for direct sales (primarily to government). Recently, however, most or all of Inxight’s tokenization has been opened up to the OEM channel.
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Opinions differ about the visualization tools. There have been a small number of large (even seven-figure) sales. There are several different tools. Some or all are Java, vs. Business Objects’ recent Flash/Flex focus. My tentative position is to be quite skeptical, but I guess – fairly literally, actually – that we’ll see.
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Federated search and categorization still sound to me more like fond hopes than big deals yet.
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Tea leaves at Business Objects are contradictory about how much interference there will be with the business of OEMing to BOBJ’s competitors. I stand by my prior prediction – Business Objects will look for ways of tightly integrating Inxight’s OEM business into the rest of BOBJ, but ultimately will decide not to kill the golden goose. Yes, I recognize that Inxight will be a much smaller fraction of BOBJ’s business than DataDirect has been at its two corporate parents (currently Progress Software). Still, I think the DataDirect analogy is a highly instructive one.
Basically, I still think what I thought before.
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One Response to “Insight into Inxight”
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Curt, one Inxight OEM customer told me that their agreement has 6 more years to run and that Inxight is committed to maintaining the OEMed software. All the same, if I were that customer I’d be exploring alternatives.
The Inxight visualization tools were cutting edge several years ago but they haven’t been enhanced in years and they show their age. If I ran Business Objects, I’d look at modernizing them and integrating them with other platform components in order to compete with visualization focused BI upstarts such as Spotfire, Tableau, and Qliktech.