December 12th, 2007 Curt Monash
When Andrew McKay was at FAST, I grumped about his search/BI integration story. Now that he’s trying to do the same thing at a startup called Attivio, it sounds more plausible.
Attivio is having a house party and product rollout in the latter part of January, and details are scarce in the mean time. But here are some highlights.
- Attivio was founded in August. It has 21 people and 1 VC. The VC has invested >$6 million and committed >$12 million total.
- Attivio has ambitious plans for a fully integrated data management/real-time BI stack. It’s currently called the “Active Intelligence Engine.”
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Posted in Attivio, BI integration, Investment research and trading, Lucene, Open source text analytics | 1 Comment »
November 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
I just had a quick chat with text mining vendor Clarabridge’s CEO Sid Banerjee. Naturally, I asked the standard “So who are you seeing in the marketplace the most?” question. Attensity is unsurprisingly #1. What’s new, however, is that Inxight – heretofore not a text mining presence vs. commercially-focused Clarabridge – has begun to show up a bit this quarter, via the Business Objects sales force. Sid was of course dismissive of their current level of technological readiness and integration – but at least BOBJ/Inxight is showing up now.
The most interesting point was text mining SaaS (Software as a Service). When Clarabridge first put out its “We offer SaaS now!” announcement, I yawned. But Sid tells me that about half of Clarabridge’s deals now are actually SaaS. The way the SaaS technology works is pretty simple. The customer gathers together text into a staging database – typically daily or weekly – and it gets sucked into a Clarabridge-managed Clarabridge installation in some high-end SaaS data center. If there’s a desire to join the results of the text analysis with some tabular data from the client’s data warehouse, the needed columns get sent over as well. And then Clarabridge does its thing.
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Posted in BI integration, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, IBM and UIMA, Text mining | 1 Comment »
November 12th, 2007 Curt Monash
Today’s big news is IBM’s $5 billion acquisition of Cognos. Part of the analyst conference call was two customer examples of how the companies had worked together in the past — and one of those two had a lot of “integration of structured and unstructured data.” The application sounded more like a 360-degree customer view, retrieving text documents alongside relational records, than it did like hardcore text analytics. Even so, it illustrates a trend that I was seeing even before BOBJ’s buy of Inxight, namely an increasing focus in the business intelligence world on at least the trappings of text analytics.
Technorati Tags: IBM, Cognos, unstructured data
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Posted in BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, IBM and UIMA | 3 Comments »
October 17th, 2007 Curt Monash
I’m at the Business Objects annual user conference, and had a couple of chances to talk with Inxight/text analytics folks. When I asked about areas of commercial application traction, answers were similar to those I got from Attensity and Clarabridge, but not quite the same. Specifically:
- Voice of the Customer is definitely tops.
- Some of the other applications Attensity and Clarabridge mentioned appear as well (e.g., antifraud).
- Business Objects also has a couple of customers looking at text mining as an aid to medical records, e.g. by helping to catch errors in tabular-field coding.
- There are some projects in actual investment research/analysis/trading, e.g. in correlating news announcements and stock price movements.
The Business Objects/Inxight folks also made a couple of interesting general technical points.
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Posted in Application areas, BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, Investment research and trading, Voice of the Customer | No Comments »
October 8th, 2007 Curt Monash
More precisely, SAP is acquiring Business Objects, and of course Business Objects already acquired Inxight.
This could be interesting …
Posted in BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, SAP AG and TREX, Text mining | No Comments »
October 6th, 2007 Curt Monash
And for my sixth text mining post this weekend, here are some highlights of the Clarabridge technology story. (Sorry if it sounds clipped, but I’m a bit burned out …)
- Like Attensity, Clarabridge practices exhaustive extraction.* That is, they do linguistics against documents, extract all sorts of entities and relationships among the entities from each document, and dump the results into a relational database.
- Unlike Attensity, which uses a simple normalized relational schema, Clarabridge dumps the extracted data into a star schema. (The Clarabridge folks are from Microstrategy, which – surely not coincidentally – also favors star schemas.)
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Posted in BI integration, Clarabridge, Comprehensive or exhaustive extraction, Ontologies and context identification, Text mining | 1 Comment »
August 3rd, 2007 Curt Monash
I’ve been pretty skeptical about Inxight’s Awareness Server. My theory is that ordinary enterprise search engines can index remotely anyway, and they offer much better search functionality. Inxight’s Ian Hersey was kind enough to write in and offer two counter-arguments.
First, Ian points out that there are circumstances when, due to security and permissions, you can’t really index everything via one search engine. Specifically, he offers the government as an example. OK, I can see that in the government, with its classified and/or regulated silos. However, I have trouble thinking of many more examples. While there certainly are plenty of instances where a variety of organizations share information on a somewhat arms-length basis, it’s tough to think of such cases where federated text search would come into play.
Second, Ian in essence disputes my claim of inferior functionality. While implicitly conceding — as well he should! — that Inxight’s Awareness Server doesn’t do some things full-featured search engines do, he points out analytic features that may not be found in conventional search engine offering. The big one he calls out is faceted search — which of course was the core of Intelliseek,the acquisition Awareness Server came from. Hmm. Faceted search has a checkered history, with Excite and Northern Light being perhaps the most visible among many failures. On the other hand, it’s a great idea that keeps being tried, and some versions — notably Endeca’s — have turned out well.
I guess I’ll have to reserve judgment on that part until I look at Inxight’s product and see what they do and don’t actually have.
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Posted in BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, Endeca, Enterprise search, Search and text storage | No Comments »
July 16th, 2007 Curt Monash
I dropped by Progress a couple of weeks ago for back-to-back briefings on Apama and EasyAsk. EasyAsk is Larry Harris’ second try at natural language query, after the Intellect product fell by the wayside at Trinzic, the company Artificial Intelligence Corporation grew into.* After a friendly divorce from the company he founded, if my memory is correct, Larry was able to build EasyAsk very directly on top of the Intellect intellectual property.
*Other company or product names in the mix at various times include AI Corp and English Wizard. Not inappropriately, it seems that Larry has quite an affinity for synonyms …
EasyAsk is still a small business. The bulk is still in enterprise query, but new activity is concentrated on e-commerce applications. While Larry thinks that they’ve solved most of the other technical problems that have bedeviled him over the past three decades, the system still takes too long to implement.
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Posted in BI integration, Mercado, Natural language and speech recognition, Natural language processing (NLP), Progress and EasyAsk, Speech recognition | No Comments »
July 14th, 2007 Curt Monash
When a company announces an acquisition, it usually does a round of limited-content briefings, in no small part because the antitrust lawyers won’t let them do anything else. Once the deal closes, antitrust restrictions are lifted, and they do another round of briefings. These, typically, are vague and platitudinous.
Business Objects/Inxight have now reached that point. Even so, my briefing yesterday had some aspects worth writing up.
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Posted in BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, Enterprise search, Search and text storage | 2 Comments »
May 26th, 2007 Curt Monash
In a comment posted to this Andy Hayler blog entry, a former Inxight board member mentions Inxight’s broad patent portfolio. I don’t know what defensible value is or isn’t there, but I do know that patent positions are important to Business Objects. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight | No Comments »