Cloud-Based Text Analysis Expands Data Sources

A cloud-based text analytics tool unveiled by venture-backed startup Attensity targets both corporate and social text-based data stores.

Attensity, Redwood City, Calif., said this week its “DiscoverNow” text analytics application is integrated with the Informatica Cloud, which among other features is designed to integrate and manage cloud data and applications. Attensity said its text analytics tool utilizes the Informatica Cloud’s ability to synchronize data from business applications like Salesforce.com.

The cloud-based tool can churn through more than 150 internal and external text-based data sources. After analyzing corporate or social data, the application then automatically categorizes documents and articles into logical groupings, the company said, with the goal of providing an overview of business intelligence in real time.

Among the applications for the text analytics tool is tracking what customers are saying about a company’s products and services. The DiscoverNow tool is designed to “synthesize both structured and unstructured data from any source” to provide more customer insights, Attensity CEO Howard Lau asserted in a statement.

Given growing data volumes increasingly driven by social media, the startup stressed the tool’s ability to automate more than 80 percent of data tagging and categorization previously done manually. Competing text analytics tools only automate about 20 percent of these sorting tasks, Attensity claimed.

“When data sources are disparately distributed and decision makers don’t have the data at their fingertips, then they are looking at an inaccurate view of their data,” asserted Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president and general manger of Informatica Cloud.

The tool’s automatic categorization capability is driven by natural language processing technology that derives and combines far-flung external data sources into logical categories based on keywords, patterns, events and other characteristics. Attensity attributed the claimed higher success rate of the DiscoverNow tool to its ability to distinguish between different usages of common terms.

The text analysis tool also integrates company data sources often scattered across various enterprise applications. The startup said its tool understands text data generated by Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle, Hadoop, MySQL, Dropbox and other databases and sources.

Additionally, it can aggregate external text sources including, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube along with customer forums and review web sites. That unstructured data can then be combined with internal data, the startup said.

As a cloud-based analytics application, Attensity said DiscoverNow could be deployed in a number of days. It can be updated using a drag-and-drop interface.

The text analytics application is available immediately.

The market for text mining appears to be heating up as retailers and other customers seek to scour social media for insights about what customers are saying about their product and services. Retailers currently account for an estimated one-third of the text analytics market, which could be worth $6.5 billion by 2020, according to a recent Allied Market Research study.

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