The outlook for application of text analytics in enterprises has never been so bright. Organization leaders in IT and business are surely recognizing the true potential of text analytics in solving a myriad of challenges as they witness an explosion of unstructured content within and beyond their own firewalls. MeshLabs’s own experience in the market place is confirming this trend. Leslie Owens of Forrester predicted this trend in her blog, Text Analytics: A Key Trend to Watch over the Next Three Years. I couldn’t agree more with her.
Moving from Why to How
The question “Why Text Analytics?” is heard less these days from enterprise IT leaders. Consistent with typical buyer decision pattern pertaining to new technologies, the question has moved from “Why” to “How.” IT-led organizations are not asking why text analytics should be used to unlock the value hidden in their content, but they are asking how to maximize value on their impending investment in text analytics. They are asking how to make the right vendor or platform choice. Given the current fragmented state of vendors, making the right choice is not easy. Savvy leaders are addressing the challenge by designing smarter pilot programs with more succinct objectives and by assigning their best minds to evaluate the true ROI of the platforms.
Depth and flexibility will trump the choice in 2011 and beyond
Vendors who can offer a comprehensive enterprise vision and scope of text analytics platform that has functional depth built on top of a scientifically rigorous set of algorithms will surface to the top. New benchmark levels will be demanded on the accuracy of the underlying algorithms that transform the content, whether it is in entity extraction, sentiment analysis, or content recommendation. Flexibility requirements will expand to include an even more heterogeneous set of connectors to operational content sources within the enterprise and in the cloud. APIs and frameworks have already become standard features, but more will be demanded to operationalize the notion of unified information access without diluting the security and scalability standards. We are still in the initial stages of bridging the divide between structured and unstructured content. The value chain would certainly be incomplete without tighter integration between the two content worlds. Strategic and deep collaborations with traditional BI vendors would be imperative to realize this goal.
We at MeshLabs share these broad vision themes for our enterprise text analytics platform. We are excited about the outlook and are committed to delivering a more differentiated product for our clients. We are up to it with a renewed sense of rigor and urgency.
