Business Objects and Inxight

Analysis of text analytics pioneer Inxight, recently acquired by Business Objects, which itself was acquired by SAP. Also covered are Business Objects’ partnerships with text mining vendors such as Attensity. Related subjects include:

May 23, 2007

(A little) more on Business Objects/Inxight

After missing what seems to have been an uninformative press conference anyway, I hooked up later with the Business Objects folks on the phone. I say that it was probably uninformative because in the short call, it was pointed out to me that they really weren’t at liberty to say much anyway. Here are a couple of tidbits I picked up even so.

May 22, 2007

Business Objects is acquiring Inxight!

The press conference is a little ways off, but the news has come across the wire that Business Objects is acquiring text analytics/text mining vendor Inxight.

Quick context on Business Objects: BOBJ is a pioneer — perhaps THE pioneer — of modern business intelligence. Recently it has gone on an acquisition-heavy bulking-up strategy. There is no assumption that ALL its pieces will fit into one seamless whole. For large enterprises, it is increasing its professional services emphasis (as a complement to new license sales, not a replacement for them).

Quick context on Inxight: Inxight spun off from Xerox PARC with all sorts of cool text-related technologies. But while it’s somewhat of a competitor in generic text mining, visualization, and so on, the one market where it has really succeeded is in OEM software for filtering and tokenization, serving search and text mining vendors alike. Read more

April 4, 2007

TEMIS, part 1 – overview

Due to various transatlantic communication glitches, I’d never had a serious briefing with text mining vendor TEMIS until yesterday, when I finally connected with CEO Eric Bregand. So here’s a quick TEMIS overview; I’ll discuss what they actually do in a separate post.

November 11, 2006

Text mining and search, joined at the hip

Most people in the text analytics market realize that text mining and search are somewhat related. But I don’t think they often stop to contemplate just how close the relationship is, could be, or someday probably will become. Here’s part of what I mean:

  1. Text mining powers search. The biggest text mining outfits in the world, possibly excepting the US intelligence community, are surely Google, Yahoo, and perhaps Microsoft.
  2. Search powers text mining. Restricting the corpus of documents to mine, even via a keyword search, makes tons of sense. That’s one of the good ideas in Attensity 4.
  3. Text mining and search are powered by the same underlying technologies. For starters, there’s all the tokenization, extraction, etc. that vendors in both areas license from Inxight and its competitors. Beyond that, I think there’s a future play in integrated taxonomy management that will rearrange the text analytics market landscape.

Read more

July 26, 2006

Pioneers moving on

Ramana Rao is leaving Inxight, or has by now. Today I also discovered that Todd Wakefield is leaving Attensity. Such things happen in all industries, of course.

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