News & Surprises from Text Analytics Summit 2008

Others have reported on this year's Text Analytics Summit: the prevalence of Voice of the {customer | Market | Patient} as a theme, the focus on sentiment analysis and on BI integration, the vendor announcements, applications for analysis of social media data, and so on. This commentary is helpful so I'll link to it in this article, and I have additional observations to share, drawn from summit discussions, concerning the evolution of the text-analytics market.Start with links for blog postings and articles:

If you've posted a summit write-up that I haven't listed, just let me know and I'll add a link.

I had asked the summit's End User Panel participants to describe something unexpected, something surprising, they had learned using text analytics. I'll save their responses for another time, but pursuing that theme, here are a few surprises I encountered:

First, amazingly, Sue Feldman from IDC, Fern Halper from Hurwitz & Associates, and I were in rough agreement on the size of the text-analytics market, about $200-$250 million annually. We really differed a bit only on exactly what the market-sizing covers beyond software licensing. We each place continued annual growth somewhere in the 25%-50% range, which incidentally far outpaces BI-market growth projections. (The fourth member of the Analyst Panel, Nick Patience from the 451 Group, explained that his firm doesn't publish market-size numbers.) (I offer a bit more by way of market outlook in my pre-summit white paper, Text Technologies in the Mainstream.)

An earlier surprise was the overflow turn-out for my pre-summit workshop, Text Analytics for Dummies. I made 25 copies of my materials, thinking I'd need 20 but falling 10-12 short, another bit of evidence of rapid growth in broad-market ("Dummies") interest. I'll share those materials with IE readers. Nick Patience got similar, great turn-out for his market-survey session that followed my session.

Next, the number of attendees from start-ups was particularly interesting, both companies developing or launching new products and companies looking to license technology, most often Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, especially for sentiment analysis, from established vendors. Summit attendance was 175-200 — I'm summit chair, but the summit is commercially run and I'm not privy to the numbers — of whom I'd estimate 40% were current end-users or prospects, 25% were from established vendors, 25% were from start-ups and others entering the field and consultants, and the rest were analysts, journalists, and miscellaneous others.

I'll conclude with one disappointing surprise on the technical front, that UIMA — the Unstructured Information Management Architecture, an integration framework created by IBM and released several years ago as open source to the Apache project — has not been more broadly accepted. IBM software architect Thomas Hampp spoke about his company's use of the framework in the OmniFind Analytics edition, but Technology Panel participants said that their companies — Attensity (David Bean), Business Objects (Claire Thomas), Clarabridge (Justin Langseth), Jodange (Larry Levy), and SPSS (Olivier Jouve) — simply do not perceive user demand for the interoperability that UIMA can offer.

I enjoyed every aspect of the 2008 Text Analytics Summit and will plan to post more about what I learned.Others have reported on this year's Text Analytics Summit: the prevalence of Voice of the {Customer | Market | Patient} as a theme, the focus on sentiment analysis and on BI integration, applications for analysis of social media data, and so on. I'll link to this commentary, and I have additional observations on the evolution of the text-analytics market.