Adoption of text analytics has accelerated in the years I've followed the topic, with growth in expected and unexpected directions both. It wasn't hard to foresee extension of leading data mining workbenches to text, but I'll admit I had thought BI vendors would be much quicker to build handling of "unstructured information" into their technology stacks. (This lag has created partnering opportunities for a number of BI-focused text analytics companies. Business Objects' acquisition of Inxight and SAS's of Teragram show that the BI big guns are closing the gap.) And I didn't anticipate the nature of the solutions, other than semantically enhanced search and expansion in the legal, tax & regulatory (LTR) sector, that would be responsible for the greatest market growth. I'm referring to sectors such as media & publishing and applications including competitive intelligence and Voice of the Customer analytics supporting CRM, product management, and marketing.I appraise the growth of the text-analytics solutions sector in the white paper I wrote for the 2008 Text Analytics Summit, Text Technologies in the Mainstream: Text Analytics Solutions, Applications, and Trends. If you read it, let me know what you think. The white paper is free, but sorry, you have to register for access.

Overall, I see on-going growth in the text-analytics (software and support) market continuing at 25% year-on-year, over twice the rate of BI-market growth, leading to a $250 million worldwide text analytics market in 2007.

The Text Analytics Summit is slated for June 16-17 in Boston. (I'm the summit chairperson, but I don't have a financial stake in participation.) The preliminary agenda is now on-line with updates to come. The summit offers a great opportunity to learn more, a chance to meet practitioners, end-users, and industry experts and to catch up with software and solution vendors. Please consider attending.

P.S. I'm slated to speak on "BI and the 'Unstructured Data' Challenge" at the May 9 meeting of TDWI's Washington DC chapter. Please attend if you'll be in DC that day.Adoption of text analytics has accelerated in the years I've followed the topic, with growth in expected and unexpected directions both. It wasn't hard to foresee extension of data mining workbenches to text, but I had thought BI vendors would be much quicker to build "unstructured information" into their stacks. And I didn't anticipate the nature of the solutions that would be responsible for the greatest market growth...