Attensity and Tremendous Momentum
October 3, 2008
With the economy in the US stumbling along, I found Attensity’s September 30, 2008, “Momentum” news release intriguing. The information issued by the the analytics company is here. I had to struggle to decipher some of the jargon. For example, First Person Intelligence. This is a product name with a trademark. The idea is that email or phone calls from a customer are analyzed by Attensity. The resulting insights yield information about a particular customer; hence, First Person Intelligence. You can see FPI in action by clicking here. The company won an award called the Stevie. If you are curious or you want to enter to compete to snag the 2009 award, click here. I think I know what text analytics is, so I jumped to VoC. The acronym means “voice of the customer.” I think the notion is that a company pays attention to emails, call center notes, and survey data. I’m not certain if VoC is a subset of FPI or if VoCis the broader concept and FPI is a subset of VoC.
The core of the news release is that Attensity has landed some major accounts. Customer names are tough to come by, so you may want to note these organizations who have licensed the Attensity technology but hopefully not the jargon:
- JetBlue
- Royal Bankk of Canada
- Travelocity
For me, the most useful part of the company-written article was this passage:
The text analytics market is rapidly moving out of the early adopter stage. Industry analyst firm Hurwitz & Associates estimates an annual growth rate for this market at 30 to 50 percent. According to a survey conducted last year by the firm, the largest growth area is in customer care-related applications. In fact, over 70 percent of the companies surveyed that had deployed, or were considering deploying the technology, cited customer care as a key application area.
The growth rate does not match my calculation which pegs growth at a more leisurely 10 to 18 percent on an annual basis. The Hurwitz organization is much larger than this single goose operation. Endangered species like this addled goose are more conservative, and its estimates in a grim financial market are less optimistic than other consultants’ and analysts’.
In my Beyond Search study for the Gilbane Group, published in April 2008, I gave Attensity high marks. Its deep extraction technology yields useful metadata. Since my early 2008 analysis, Attensity has worked hard to productize its system. Calls centers are a market segment in need of help. Most companies want to contain support costs.
In my opinoin, Attensity’s technology is better than its explanation of its products and those products names. I wonder if the addition of marketers to a technology-centric company is a benefit or a drawback. Thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, October 3, 2008
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