Beyond that, Alessandro denies all the rumors that have grown out of TEMIS being hard to reach recently. He reports that pharma is still TEMIS’s big market, but stresses that this covers a range of apps, from research to Voice of the Market. I do get the sense that TEMIS’s sentiment extraction capabilities are less sophisticated than some of the other vendors’ — but the other vendors I’m thinking of are pretty focused on English, SPSS aside. If you need sentiment analysis in non-English languages — e.g., French or Italian — TEMIS should definitely be on your vendor shortlist.

• Yep, Voice Of The Customer is hot, in “many markets”; Eric specifically mentioned banking, car, energy, food, and retail. He further sees IBM backing VotC as text’s “killer app.” (Note: Temis has a history of partnering with IBM, most notably via its unusually strong commitment to UIMA.)
• Specifically, THE hot topics in the European market these days are competitive intelligence and sentiment analysis. (Note: I’ve always thought Temis got serious about competitive analysis a little earlier than most other text mining vendors did.)
• Life sciences is an ever growing focus for Temis.
• I confused him a bit with how I phrased my question about custom publishing and Temis’ Mark Logic partnership. But he did express favorable views of the market, specifically in the area of integrating text mining and native XML database management, and even volunteered that nStein appears to be doing well.

Company: TEMIS
Job Title: Text Mining Consultant
Description: TEMIS Be part of an exciting new adventure!

TEMIS, leading provider of text analytics and text mining technologies in Europe, increases its North-American presence to answer the overwhelming demand from its customers in the Publishing and Life Sciences industries. TEMIS solutions help thousands of users everyday access critical business information in a timely manner, using concepts and meaning extraction, automatic classification and relationships representation. TEMIS solutions have been already been deployed by key industry players to address their information management needs in various areas. TEMIS is headquartered in Philadelphia, PA and Paris, France. For more information, please visit: www.temis.com

Mission

The Text Mining Consultant is providing functional and technical expertise during project missions in the field of information management. He/She works with TEMIS clients to successfully implement and deploy our award-winning enterprise applications by analyzing customer’s requirements with the goal to provide best-in-class information extraction capabilities.

Main Responsibilities

• Participate in project implementation
• Provide functional & technical advices to customers
• Provide all functional and technical levels of support to the PProfessional Services team, being in meetings/calls with or without customers.
• Perform detailed analysis of customers’ requirements wiith regards to TEMIS information management aspects.
• Write functional & technical specifications to match the cuustomer business requirements.
• Customize, develop and roll-out high quality software solutionss, including Skill Cartridges™, the innovative knowledge components of TEMIS solutions.
• Implement solutions at customer’s premises

Additional Responsibilities

• Contribute to consultant team organization
• Actively participate to consulting coordination meetings.
• Share knowledge and methodologies with other team members.
• Provide functional/technical expertise and workload estimate duuring project planning sessions.

Necessary Skills

• BS in Computer Science or Information Technology (MS preferred)
• 2~5 years consulting experience in Text-mining or related such as Data Mining, Business Intelligence, Document Management, Enterprise Search, Knowledge Management
• Excellent knowledge of information structuring languages (XML, …) and scripting languages (Perl, Python, …). .
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skillls.
• Ability to work in a team-oriented environment, on several projects in parallel, with short time constraints in highly demanding customer environment.
• Be autonomous, reactive, proactive and innovative in order to pprovide solutions for the clients’ business requirements.
• Experience in implementing software solutions using Java & Web (JSPs, Servlets, EJBs, …) technologies is a plus.
• Other languages (French, Spanish) a plus.

This position is open in Philadelphia, PA but involves traveling through the country for consulting missions, as well as to France for team and company meetings.

And here’s the other one.

Company: TEMIS
Job Title: Pre-sales Consultant
Description: Be part of an exciting new adventure!

TEMIS, leading provider of text analytics and text mining technologies in Europe, increases its North-American presence to answer the overwhelming demand from its customers in the Life Sciences industry. TEMIS solutions help thousands of users everyday access critical business information in a timely manner, using concepts and meaning extraction, automatic classification and relationships representation. TEMIS solutions have been already been deployed by key industry players such as Pfizer, Novartis or Sanofi-Aventis to address their information management needs in various areas. TEMIS is headquartered in Philadelphia, PA and Paris, France. For more information, please visit: www.temis.com

Mission

Assist in maximizing revenue and optimizing deal closure time by supporting the sales efforts with detailed analysis of customer requirements, the development of customer-specific value proposition and proof through functional demonstrations.

Main Responsibilities
- Provide all technical and functional levels of support to the Sales Executives, being in meetings/calls with or without customers
- Perform detailed analysis of prospective customers’ requirements in all aspects (functional, technical, …)
- Develop customer-specific value propositions based on detailed analysis
- Prepare data and/or materials for the demonstration as a proof of concept for TEMIS products, services and our specific value proposition
- Assist in the performance of demonstrations and other sales visits to clients and prospective clients
- Contribute to answering RFPs and RFIs by writing the functional and technical sections
- Provide additional support when needed throughout the company (Seminars, trade shows, and training programs)

Additional Responsibilities
- Closely work with product management to insure that generic customer requirements are properly captured, translated into features and integrated in the product roadmap.
- Participate as an active member of the product team to insure that product issues identified by the sales team are being addressed by product management.
- Stay abreast of all new product developments and always have the ‘latest and greatest’ product information to execute the sales cycle, and insure that the sales team also do
- Create and maintain a dynamic and stable demonstration environment including the latest product releases and a demo database which can be used to effectively present all aspects of TEMIS solutions.

Necessary Skills
- 2-5 years pre-sales experience in related software markets such as Business Intelligence, Document Management, Content Management, Enterprise Search, Knowledge Management
- BA/BS in relevant fields (Life Sciences or Computer Science)
- Familiarity with all aspects of Text Mining.
- Ability to work under pressure, with short time constraints in highly demanding customer environment
- Be reactive, proactive, creative and innovative in order to provide solutions for the prospective clients’ needs.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
- Strong organizational skills.

The common theme among these markets seems to be an emphasis on applications where complex semantic analysis is important. Actually, I think it would be expedient for TEMIS to use the marketing hook of saying the subjects it does analysis about are complex. Nobody likes to be told their software is complex, but they don’t mind being told they’re experts in a complex discipline themselves.

• Life sciences is TEMIS’ coolest and probably biggest vertical. Indeed, so far as I can tell TEMIS is the runaway market leader in text analytics for pharmaceutical vendors (research and patient care are wider open). Eric mentioned four particular vertical applications — scientific research, patent analysis, adverse event detection, competitive intelligence. And he’s very proud of the UI, which for example lets a scientist actually draw a molecule, thus overcoming the problem that a single protein can have many different names (I think over 20 in some cases).
• In publishing, TEMIS does the extraction and back-end annotation to power custom publishing applications and the like. Mark Logic is a natural and repeated partner (Eric and Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg are friends and former Business Objects colleagues). In that TEMIS sounds a lot like ClearForest.
• Competitive intelligenceconsists of crawling the web, reading documents, and funneling the results to a dashboard they provide. This is TEMIS’ biggest market outside life sciences and publishing.
• Temis has expanded adverse impact detection beyond life sciences into the automotive and food markets.
• TEMIS also has a couple of projects looking at surveys about, I think, customer satisfaction.

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• TEMIS has 50 people; 3 main businesses and a couple of secondary ones; two larger offices in France; and smaller offices in Germany and the US. As would be expected, TEMIS’ customer base is concentrated in Continental Europe. The US exceptions seem concentrated in the life sciences vertical (not coincidentally, the US office is outside Philadelphia).
• Like Inxight, TEMIS is at least partly a spin-off from Xerox’s text analytics efforts. Indeed, its Grenoble office was acquired from Xerox. Unlike Inxight, TEMIS doesn’t serious pursue OEM business, but a couple of exceptions have occurred (Eric mentioned Convera and Documentum).
• TEMIS claims to follow a middle course between ClearForest on the one and Attensity and Clarabridge on the other, in that it doesn’t offer exhaustive extraction but does offer “iterative extraction.” (More on that below.) Frankly, I not yet sure that there’s much of a difference in this regard between TEMIS and ClearForest. Like ClearForest – and I’m not sure Attensity would completely dispute this – TEMIS believes that really sophisticated semantic analysis is hard in an exhaustive-extraction scenario. Eric also raised size/performance issues about exhaustive extraction, but I found those unconvincing in this era of cheap and powerful data warehouse engines.
• Unlike most of the rest of the text analytics industry, TEMIS really likes UIMA, having committed to it a year and a half ago. So, apparently, does the customer for at least one large deal jointly won with IBM (Europol). The big benefit of UIMA is openness/connectivity, but load-balancing/failover also got mentioned a few times, and that’s attributed to UIMA as well.

I’ll confess to being a little unclear about “iterative exhaustion,” and indeed to suspecting that it conflates two different things. One would just be the inherent waterfall-style processing inherent to UIMA and, for that matter, to most other approaches to tokenization. The other is the idea that you can do a decent job of identifying what’s in each document in a large corpus in one pass, then do another pass focusing more intently on the ones that might have exactly what you’re looking for.

Links:

• Attensity FRN (fact-relationship network)
• Attensity vs. ClearForest
• Clarabridge overview
• UIMA
• DBMS2 coverage of data warehouse appliances and other data warehouse engines
• The French presence in text analytics

• Attensity wants to make text analytics very easy to integrate into business intelligence and data mining – at the moment, they’re not too focused on the differences between those two disciplines – and is trying to deliver the best possible fact extraction consistent with that charter.
• ClearForest wants to provide really great information extraction — to the limits of what can be done without excessive knowledge engineering – and is trying to integrate as well as possible with other technologies, the better to serve the customers who need what they offer.

The guy I usually talk with at ClearForest, Jay Henderson, believes that text analytics is a collection of dozens of niche markets. Not coincidentally, a lot of ClearForest’s customers are in the publishing sector (I’ve remarked on ClearForest’s synergy with Mark Logic before). Attensity obviously is trying a broader play. In Jay’s view, Inxight and TEMIS are more analogous to ClearForest than Attensity is, except that Inxight is focused on different markets (e.g. OEM and/or search), and he thinks ClearForest is just better than Temis except in a couple of specific kinds of understanding (e.g., life sciences, sentiment).

That said, both Attensity and ClearForest credibly claim to do large fractions of what the other one does. ClearForest, as the currently nichier player, takes the traditional stance “We do everything they do, and more. Most of our customers are ones who really appreciate the difference.” Attensity conveys the equally traditional attitude “We do most of what they do, and a bunch of other stuff besides. And it’s better-packaged too. As for what they do that we don’t – not a lot of customers really have a need for it.”

Frankly, most enterprises that have a need for this technology should put both Attensity and ClearForest on their short lists. But here’s one technical note that may help predict who you’ll wind up actually selecting: Attensity’s lead strategy for integration is to dump everything into relational tables, for conventional analytics-stack products like Business Objects’ and Teradata’s to manipulate. ClearForest’s lead strategy for integration has more of an SOA/XML flavor, grown out of conventional OO. If one of those sounds like an obviously better fit to your situation than the other, then that’s the vendor you absolutely, positively should not leave out of your evaluation process.