SAS announced the acquisition of Teragram, a natural language processing (NLP), taxonomy generation and linguistic analysis technology provider. The acquisition will enhance SAS’ text mining and analytical BI offerings, and extend them to enterprise and mobile search. Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed. (See announcement.)
Typically business intelligence is associated with structured data, data warehousing and statistical models. Those in the ECM industry who have followed the search and retrieval market know, however, that search and taxonomy software from vendors such as Teragram, as well as Autonomy, InXight, Vivisimo, Stratify, Clear Forest, Factiva, IBM, Xerox, Mondeca, FAST, Mondosoft, has been capable of similar intelligence and analysis of unstructured content for several years .
Despite that, all too often, enterprise search initiatives focus exclusively on search and retrieval. While a most important and fundamental component to any ECM strategy, enterprises can extract a much higher level of value and insight if they appeciate and leverage these search and text management tools beyond search.
This acquisition by SAS marks a new level of market recognition of the power of natural language processing. SAS is a notable player in the BI space. Their recognition that the level of insights possible from properly managing structured content must also be extended to unstructured content is a wake-up call to everyone. Unstructured content grows exponentially on a daily basis, including resources such as web pages, word processing files, presentations, e-mail, to name a few. Text analytics, mining and management technology, that leverages NLP can mine the intelligence that is contained in these resources, individually, and more powerfully collectively. The latter ability is a form of emergent technology, a function that is fundamental to Enterprise 2.0, the focus of our upcoming Market IQ (register for webinar now.) In deed, search is identified as a key enabling technology for Enterprise 2.0 in the Market IQ, and in our Enterprise 2.0 training program.
For this reason, and others, the subject of text management, search and analytics will be covered in great detail in the AIIM Q2 Market IQ on Findability. This report will expound on the fact that there is much more to search and taxonomy than locating content, typically the focus of enterprise search. Search and retrieval are just the tip of the iceberg. Findability leverages the full power of NLP. The technologies that enable intelligent responses to user generated queries can also be the basis of emergent wisdom from content collections, sentiment detection, trends analysis and predictive analysis. These applications quickly extend NLP from the enterprise search market squarely into BI, risk management and knowledge management.
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