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| Not by Technology Alone by Susan Feldman, IDC Smart vendors in the software industry are realizing that good technology by itself is not enough to make an application compelling. As business users usurp the role of IT in selecting the applications they use, this trend is becoming more apparent. Our research on search-based applications and intelligent workspaces shows these task-based/process-based applications that bundle the technology with appropriate and useful information, as well as collaboration and workflow are growing faster than technology-alone applications in the search market. From this combination of capabilities, Attensity has built a voice of the customer application that enables companies to act on the information they have mined: to respond appropriately and automatically, or to route messages to the right people in the organization to take action. The acquisition of Biz360 by the Attensity Group on April 28th is a good example of this trend. Attensity is a text analytics vendor, specializing in voice of the customer applications, although their technology is used generally as well to deeply mine text, extracting entities, events, relationships, and sentiment for a variety of enterprise and government uses. They merged with empolis and Living-e in mid-2009, adding information management, workflow, call center response management, and online self service to their portfolio. This merger also extended their footprint to Europe. What they didn't have, until this latest acquisition, was the ability to access massive amounts of traditional social media in near real time. Biz360 is a massively scalable "listening platform". It currently tracks 70 million traditional and social media sources for clients who need to monitor what the world is saying about them and their products. It provides some clausal analysis as well, and has a business-user application for reporting. What it lacked was access to the internal data that Attensity was mining for its customers — from customer email and surveys, or from CRM systems — and the deeper text analytics that Attensity could provide. Biz 360 provided extensive reports on what the world was saying, but it lacked the response platform for clients to act on the information. Attensity360, the new merged product combines the best of both of these applications. It mines both internal and external information, in near real time, it provides a response platform so that the information can be acted upon, and it combines the technology with the information so that businesses don't need to integrate millions of sources themselves in order to take the pulse of their market. Because it is offered as software as a service (SaaS), the scale and coverage can be massive enough to cover the whole Web, rather than the targeted subsections that Attensity was offering its customers. Voice of the Customer has been one of the hottest areas of development in both text analytics and CRM applications. Growth has been quick, outpacing the software market as a whole. IDC believes that this acquisition will put pressure on competitors in this area who will need to match the scope of the information Attensity provides, as well as their depth of analysis. write your comments about the article :: © 2010 Computing News :: home page |