Profile of Seth Grimes
News & Commentary Posts: 213
Seth Grimes is an analytics strategy consultant with Alta Plana and organizes the Sentiment Analysis Symposium. Follow him on Twitter at @sethgrimes
Articles by Seth Grimes
posted in May 2007
5/24/2007
Buying Inxight is a smart move for Business Objects. Folding the capability to extract information from text into their technology stack is a natural next step for the company. This acquisition affirms the text-BI/integrated-analytics strategy being pursued by other vendors, notable Attensity, Clarabridge, Intelligent Results, SAS and SPSS. It also follows the precedent of data-integrator Informatica's late 2006 purchase of text-analytics vendor Itemfield.
5/17/2007
An Accelovation briefing earlier this week was doubly helpful in affirming my take on the maturity of the text-analytics market and in showing me that I might be doing my job wrong… The company is pitching solutions to business analysts and not to IT geeks like me, a sure sign that the underlying technologies are stable and capable.
That a vendor can center its message on "what" rather than "how" is a hallmark of a maturing market.
5/16/2007
I profited from my recent Rome visit to learn more about an aggressive open-source business intelligence contender, SpagoBI. The software is produced by Rome-based systems integrator Engineering Ingegneria Informatica and uses some of the same components as software from Pentaho and JasperSoft. It's packaged, however, in a framework said to be more flexible and extensible than those of open source rivals.
5/14/2007
Open-source businesses are universally hybrids, whether they seek to profit from their altruism - those companies such as CentricCRM and Pentaho that sell support for software offerings that are completely free, open source - versus those such as SugarCRM and JasperSoft that are altruistic only to the point where they can attract paying customers for the closed parts of their software stacks.
5/1/2007
I had the privilege of chairing last week's European Text Analytics Summit in Amsterdam. I've never attended any other computing event that mixes scientists, police investigators and media-company product managers with technologists. I report here on a few points that are worthy of note, grouped under the headings user stories, market, and technology.