Speedier Data Analysis Focus of Attensity’s DiscoverNow
Data about companies' customers is contained in a plethora of enterprise applications and in a growing number of external channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, challenging them to make sense of it all.
Attensity, a provider of text analytics software, wants to offer access to as many data sources as it can. To that end, today it announced a cloud-based solution called DiscoverNow that features a built-in integration with the Informatica Cloud.
“By pairing our text analytics expertise with Informatica’s ability to connect to so many applications and their data, DiscoverNow empowers users to synthesize both structured and unstructured data from any source, giving companies the most complete view of their customers,” said Attensity CEO Howard Lau in a statement.
According to the company, DiscoverNow connects to more than 150 internal and external text-based data sources, including popular enterprise apps and databases such as Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle/Siebel, Box, Concur, Dropbox, Datasift, Eloqua, JIRA, MailChimp, Marketo, NetSuite, Hadoop, MySQL and Thomson Reuters. It combines insights from these internal data sources with external text sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Reddit, forums and review sites, to offer a robust view of customer activities.
Data from social sites such as Twitter is especially important, said Cary Fulbright, Attensity's chief strategy officer, because “customers don't always tell you the truth.” In an email, he wrote, “It’s not just what they say to you directly in surveys and call center comments, it’s also what they say about you to their friends via social media and online reviews. This 360-degree view gives you a better sense of customer loyalty or possible customer churn, and also product and service quality issues.”
“The cloud and on-premise applications that companies use to run their business contain hugely valuable customer insights. But when data sources are disparately distributed and decision makers don’t have the data at their fingertips, then they are looking at an inaccurate view of their data,” said Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager, Informatica Cloud, in a statement. “The relationship between Attensity and Informatica enables our joint customers to harness internal and external data to get a real-time 360 degree view of their customers.”
According to Attensity, its natural language processing engine automatically derives meaning from and categorizes external data sources into logical categories based on keywords, themes, concepts, patterns, events and ideas.
Fulbright said Attensity outperforms competing text analytics systems that rely more heavily on keywords. “We parse sentences by subject, noun and object, so we can identify the context used,” he said. “For example, DiscoverNow understands the difference between the Venetian Hotel, Venetian blinds and Venetian gondolas, or ‘uber cool' and Uber ridesharing. Our team of linguists is constantly updating our generic and industry-specific libraries with new terms, including slang.”
Other features include:
- Ability to customize DiscoverNow through creation of rules based on language unique to a company, its brands, products and industry
- Built-in dashboards that display real-time events and trends and user-defined alerts which signal the need for immediate action
- A drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy for users to update, personalize and merge categories
In addition to its partnership with Informatica, Fulbright said Attensity is partnering with other providers of public and semi-public data.
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