November 12, 2007
Everybody’s talking about structured/unstructured integration
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.
Categories: BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, IBM and UIMA
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3 Responses to “Everybody’s talking about structured/unstructured integration”
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Curt, as you know, integrated “structured/unstructured” analytics is the raison d’être of companies such as Clarabridge and Attensity and it is supported by vendors such as Informatica that pull from both “structured” and “unstructured” sources.
I had been expecting Cognos to make a text-analytics acquisition, following in Business Objects’ footsteps, so it would be interesting to know more about the joint Cognos-IBM customer example. I also note that IBM has text-analytics relationships with both Attensity and Nstein and there are probably others.
Add Temis to your list, Seth; Temis is one of the bigger UIMA fans around.
Ultimately, the whole point of comprehensive/exhaustive extraction is to do as much of your semantic analysis as possible AFTER the text tokens have been dumped in RDBMS. If you believe in that, then there’s room for ever-tighter text analytics and BI integration. Ditto text analytics/data mining, of course, as per what SAS, SPSS, and even KXEN are doing in the area.
Best,
CAM
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