Attensity and Its Positioning
August 31, 2010
I found it notable that Attensity, a company known for its “deep extraction” technology, authored a feature in Mashable. Mashable is a Web publication that touches the throbbing heart of the Web world and its denizens. I cannot recall a company with roots in the arcane world of content processing and the government information projects contributing a story about social branding to the pulsing Mashable readership.
But the story appeared. You will want to read “7 Steps to Measuring Your Brand’s Social Media Health”. Like Lexalytics and Vivisimo, Attensity has been working overtime to develop a product and service line up that would generate healthy revenue and deliver a stakeholder pleasing profit. Attensity’s positioning seems to be expanding to embrace the world of processing social media to determine if a company is hot or not, provide insight about opinion upticks and downticks, and other “metrics” that are useful to sales, marketing, and azurini.
Here’s the passage I found quite interesting:
Social media is very easily measured with various indicators like share of voice, reach, retweets, and comments. However, measuring without a clear objective in mind won’t bring you closer to success. Nowadays, its not enough to have and execute a social media policy. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy and vibrant.
The “easily” through me for a moment as did the reference to a previous Mashable story. I think I understand the message, but I am not sure how “easy” the methods for determine social health are. What’s easy is providing the client with a report without any of the details about what’s going on under the hood. If Attensity can package “a social health monitoring service,” then the company could steal customers from Lexalytics and other companies chasing the ad sales and marketing sectors.
My thoughts on the positioning followed a slightly different line.
First, Attensity’s no cash merger with German firms and its push into social media reminded me how much the market for next generation content processing has changed in the last 36 months. The US government funds that spawned many content processing companies may be tapering off. This means that companies with the type of technology that makes Department of Defense professionals salivate has to be repurposed to new markets. Is this what Attensity is doing?
Second, the positioning and verbiage used to make the firm’s technology outputs “easy” remind me that the new markets want vastly simplified value propositions. “Easy” can generate new sales, and I know that “easy” rings the chimes of consulting firms who are abandoning the traditional information retrieval sector like rats leaving a sinking ship. I expect to see a flurry of consulting reports that describe these new, “easy” products and services. I don’t think the methods are easy, but I want Attensity and similar firms to thrive. “Easy”? Never.
Finally, the vocabulary in this Mashable write up and on the Attensity Web site follow the approach taken by Vivisimo. These former search and content processing vendors are like leopards who have pulled off a genetic trick. The spots are gone, replaced by language and services that sound more like companies that are in the research and integration business. Little wonder Garnter folded its search quadrant tent. I think more search and content processing companies will try to pull off this leopard-changing-its-spots trick.
Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 31, 2010
Freebie
Attensity SAS Staff Shuffle
June 16, 2010
I learned recently that SAS lost Manya Mayes to Attensity. No big deal, but Ms Mayes had been at SAS for 15 years. Attensity seems to be serious about its text analytics business. You can get more information in the write up “Attensity Group Appints Manya Mayes as Director of Advanced Analytics.” Here’s what an Attensity officer said about the new hire:
Her SAS expertise and customer and product experience will be a great asset to the Attensity team. Her addition will build on Attensity’s current analytic capabilities, bringing advanced analytics expertise to the team.”
A couple of thoughts. I wonder why Ms. Mayes is not an officer of Attensity. Second, will SAS push back and make some noise about competition? When Google hired an Endeca expert in eCommerce, I received email suggesting that any connection between the Endeca hire and Google’s aspirations in markets where Endeca has a presence was silly.
That’s a silly goose for you I suppose.
Stephen E Arnold, June 16, 2010
Freebie
Attensity Acquires Biz360
May 3, 2010
Attensity caught our attention with its no-cash mergers with some outfits in Germany. Now Attensity makes a more fungible move. Apparently data analysis and social media monitoring makes good bedfellows. This particular acquisition provides for even deeper analysis. VentureBeat reports on the new acquisition in their article, “Attensity Picks Up Biz360 for Enhanced Social Media Monitoring” Biz360 was a pioneer in the social monitoring world, focusing on not just collecting data but true analysis of what it means, and together with Attensity they plan to provide an even deeper analysis to their customers. This acquisition also provides the opportunity to not only monitor social conversations, but to engage and react to those conversations in real-time. New features are being promised later this summer. This continues the trend in growing social media monitoring companies and their appeal to investors.
Melody K. Smith, May 3, 2010, 2010
Note: Post was not sponsored.
Attensity in PR Full court Press
March 2, 2010
Risking the quacking of the addled goose, Attensity sent me a link to its “new” voice of the customer service. I have been tracking Attensity’s shift from deep extraction for content processing to customer support for a while. I posted on the GlobalETM.com site a map of search sectors, and Attensity is wisely focusing on customer support. You can read the “new” information about customer support at the company’s VOC Community Advantage page. The idea is to process content to find out if customers are a company’s pals. Revenues and legal actions can also be a helpful indicator too.
What interested me was the link to the Attensity blog post. “Leveraging Communities through Analytic Engines” presents an argument that organizations have useful data that can yield insights. I found this passage interesting:
Analytical engines cannot stop at simply producing a report for each community; they have to become a critical part of the platform used by the organizations to interact with and manage their customers. This platform will then integrate the content generated by all channels and all methods the organization uses to communicate, and produce great insights that can be analyzed for different channels and segments, or altogether. This analysis, and the subsequent insights, yield far more powerful customer profiles and help the organization identify needs and wants faster and better. Alas, the role of analytical engines for communities is not to analyze the community as a stand-alone channel, although there is some value on that as a starting point, but to integrate the valuable data from the communities into the rest of the data the organization collects and produce insights from this superset of feedback.
Now this is an interesting proposition. The lingo sounds a bit like that cranked out by the azure chip crowd, but that’ is what many search and content processing vendors do now? Wordsmithing.
An “analytical engine” – obviously one like Attensity’s – is an integration service. In my opinion this elevation of a component of text processing to a much larger and vital role sounds compelling. The key word for me is “superset”. This notion of taking a component and popping it up a couple of levels is what a number of vendors are pursuing. Search is not finding. Search is a user experience. Metatagging is not indexing. Metatagging is the core function of a content management system.
I understand that need to make sales, and as my GlobalETM.com diagram shows, the effort is leading to marketing plays that focus on positioning search and content processing technologies as higher value solutions. From a marketing point of view, this makes sense. The problem is that most vendors are following this path. What happens is that the technical plumbing does one or two things quite well and then some other things not so well.
Many vendors run into trouble with connectors or performance or the need for new coding to “hook” services together. Set Attensity aside, how many search and content processing vendors have an architecture that can scale economically, quickly, and efficiently? In my experience, scaling, performance, and flexibility – not the marketing lingo – make the difference. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 2, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I suppose I have to report poverty to the unemployment folks. Ooops. Out of money like some of the search and content processing vendors.
An Attensity About Face?
February 3, 2010
Update, February 3, 2010, 9 pm Eastern. A person suggested that this administrative move is designed to get around one or more procurement guidelines. Sounds reasonable but if the marketing push were ringing the cash register, would such a shift be necessary?–Stephen E Arnold
I learned that the Attensity Group has set up a business unit to sell to the Federal government. I thought Attensity’s roots were in selling to the Federal government and that the company’s diversification into marketing was a way to break free of the stereotypical vendor dependent on US government projects. Guess I was wrong again.
A reader sent me a link to this January 28, 2010, news release “Attensity Government Systems Launches as a Wholly Owned US Subsidiary of Attensity Group.” I noted this passage in the news release:
AGS offers a unique combination of the world’s leading semantic technologies: Attensity Group’s full offering of semantic engines and applications along with Inxight technologies from SAP BusinessObjects. Government agencies can now leverage — for the first time – the powerful capabilities enabled by the combination of Inxight’s multi-lingual advanced entity and event extraction with that of Attensity Group’s patented Exhaustive Extraction. Exhaustive Extraction automatically identifies and transforms the facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble spots in unstructured text into structured, actionable intelligence and then connects it back to entities – people, places and things. This new combined solution provides researchers with the deepest and broadest capabilities for identifying issues hidden in mountains of unstructured data — inside emails, letters, social media sites, passenger manifests, websites, and more.
In my experience, this is a hybrid play. Along with consulting and engineering services, Attensity will make its proprietary solutions available.
According Attensity, AGS, short for Attensity Government Systems, will:
provides semantic technologies and software applications that enable government agencies to quickly find, understand, and use information trapped in unstructured text to drive critical decision-making. AGS solutions pre-integrate nouns (entities) together with verbs, combining leading semantic technologies, such as Inxight ThingFinder, with Attensity’s unique exhaustive extraction and other semantic language capabilities. This creates a unique capability to see important relationships, create link analysis charts, easily integrate with other software packages, and connect the dots in near real-time when time is of the essence. The comprehensive suite of commercial off-the-shelf applications includes intelligence analysis, social media monitoring, voice of the citizen, automated communications response and routing, and the industry’s most extensive suite of semantic extraction technologies. With installations in intelligence, defense and civilian agencies, Attensity enables organizations to better track trends, identify patterns, detect anomalies, reduce threats, and seize opportunities faster.
I did a quick check of my files on Inxight. A similar functionality may be part of the Powerset technology that acquired acquired. My hunch is that Attensity wants to go after government contracts with a broader offering than its own deep extraction technology. The play makes sense, but I wonder if it will confuse the ad execs who use Attensity technology for quite different purposes than some US government agencies.
Will Attensity be a front runner in this about face, or will the company build out other specialized business units? I can see a customer support unit coming from a vendor, maybe Attensity, maybe not? The bottom line is that search and content processing vendors are scrambling in order to avoid what some business school egg heads call “commoditization.”
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
No one paid me to write about vendors selling to the US government. I will report this to the US government, maybe the GAO just to show that I am intrinsically responsible.
Attensity Goes for Mobile
January 21, 2010
I saw the headline “Attensity Announces New Mobile Features for Attensity Analyze for VOC”. VOC means voice of the customer. The acronym is gaining popularity as a synonym for customer support. As you know, customer support sounds so darned good and so easy to say when giving a sales pitch. But when you buy a gizmo and have a question, customer support is almost as bad as having a kidney stone when you are having a root canal. I find the “your call will be recorded for quality purposes” one of the most memorable pieces of disinformation I have encountered. When one gets to a person, I find that the individual reads a script and often does not listen to my question.
I lost a bank ATM card whilst undergoing a security check at Boston Logan airport on January 6, 2010. When I arrived in Philadelphia, I discovered that my bank ATM card, a gift card for a book store, and a handful of business cards were missing. I called my bank and requested that the card be “killed”. I was rushing to a connecting flight, and the bank reluctantly agreed to “kill” the card but only after I agreed to a $10 service charge, providing my social security number twice, my address twice, and verification via a “yes” or a “no” that I had an account at the bank. That made a wonderful impression on me because I don’t think there are too many people who knew the card number, my social security number, my bank account number, and my middle name. The institution? Ah, the fraction bank, Fifth Third.
Customer support, therefore, raises some sunken baggage, and I think the VOC acronym is designed to dance around the connotations of customer support. Well, I learn quickly, so this news story is about customer support. Attensity, according to the news item,
announced new mobile functionality for its award-winning Attensity Analyze for VOC. … Attensity Analyze for VOC offers users deeper capabilities for understanding and acting on customer feedback.
The story continued:
The new mobile functionality for Attensity Analyze for VOC enables users of mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone, the Verizon Droid, and the Google Nexus One to analyze Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback across a variety of customer conversation channels including emails, CRM notes, survey responses and social media. Users can select any of their Attensity Analyze dashboards and switch between various views from any mobile device. Interactive drill-downs allow for deep exploration of data, while automatic issues and topic alerts allow customer service professionals and executives to be alerted in near-real time to potential crises or issues with their company or their competitor’s products.
If you are struggling with your own organization’s customer support demons, you may want to check out the Attensity offering. Sounds really good. Just like an executive’s promise that his / her company provides customer support.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
Oyez, oyez, oyez. (I think I needed three oyezs to check out Google deduplication method revealed in US6658423.) I received no dough for this write up. I will report this sad fact to the Federal Reserve Bank in St Louis, a publisher of economic research on many topics often unrelated to monetary policy.
Attensity Video
October 11, 2009
Videos about search and retrieval are challenging. Attensity’s latest video focuses on using Attensity’s “deep extraction” technology to find out what customers want. The video explains that Attensity’s software “diagrams sentences.” The use case focuses on email analysis. The benefit of Attensity is that it provides a way “to look for a needle within a stack of needles.” The video works in the concept of “customer sentiment”. If you want to watch the video, navigate to Scoopler and run a query for Attensity or click this link (may go dead after some period of time). Pretty slick five minute video. The marketing ante keeps getting raised as the economy waddles along.
Stephen Arnold, October 11, 2009
Attensity: A New Angle
September 15, 2009
Attensity Group, http://www.attensity.com, is being smart and diversifying in the lousy economic climate. It’s pushing its Global Partner Network, already popular U.S. and Germany, worldwide. The network allows members to sell and distribute Attensity products; its comprehensive family of solutions (according to the company’s Web site) leverages semantic analytics to enable knowledge management professionals, business leaders, customer support personnel and customers to interpret and manage an organization’s unstructured data to get relevant and actionable answers — fast. This is deep extraction from spontaneous information sources like e-mail, texting, blogs, and web pages. Expanding this network not only revs up products sales but also provides Attensity with steady revenue from its share partners. We wish Attensity luck–most companies are looking to keep their chins above water in this economy, and Attensity is focused on growing for the future.
Jessica Bratcher, September 15, 2009
Attensity Empolis Forum
July 22, 2009
Quite an interesting Web log post “Empolis Executive Forum 2009”. There are links to selected presentations. What struck me is that the Forum seemed closer to the types of shindigs that consulting firms use to sell clients their services. Attensity is a content processing firm with some clever analytics. One talk that struck me as interesting was the keynote by Club of Rome member described this way:
The second day of the forum started with a keynote talk about “Globalization and Shaping the Future: What will be after the crisis?” by Prof. Franz Josef Radermacher…. He reported on the possible futures of our world, i.e. three possible scenarios how the world economy could evolve. Some of these ideas can be found online in an interview. For Radermacher, a key problem that the human kind must solve, is how to feed the growing human population on earth, how to deal with hunger and poverty. Besides its political dimension, his talk was a mind opener, i.e. it stipulated discussion and helped people taking new perspectives even on technical topics.
This type of marketing is a blend of big thoughts and semantic nuts and bolts is quite different from the “pass the ammunition” type of talks some large software vendors host. The question in my mind: Is Attensity licensing software or selling services?
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2009
Overflight for Attensity
July 8, 2009
Short honk: ArnoldIT.com has added Attensity to its Overflight profile service. You can see the auto generated page here. We will be adding additional search and content processing companies to the service. No charge, and this is a version of the service I use when those who hire the addled goose to prepare competitive profiles. I have a list of about 350 search and content processing vendors. I will peck away at this list until my enthusiasm wanes. If you want a for fee analysis of one of these companies, read the About section of this Web log before contacting me. Yep, I charge money for “real” analysis. Some folks expect me to survive on my good looks and charming personality. LOL.
Stephen Arnold, June 8, 2009
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