5th Annual Text Analytics Summit
June 4, 2009
I had the pleasure of spending some time at this summit (http://www.textanalyticsnews.com/usa/) over the last couple of days. Text analytics is a technology that we cover in the Business Intelligence practice at the Aberdeen Group. It’s a well run and well attended event – particularly since text analytics is still something of a niche technology that hasn’t gone mainstream yet. A couple of things stood out for me:
- Many of the customer case studies featured were using a Software-as-a-service (Saas) approach to deliver text analytics. I don’t have data on this yet (research survey on this coming later in the year….), but from customer case studies and discussion with vendors, it seems like roughly 50% have used this approach. The justification in most cases seemed to be to by-pass IT who the business users couldn’t get to engage – most likely because they just don’t have the bandwidth for it.
- Not many users seemed to have put together a solid business case to justify their projects. However, many reported that their projects had now become indispensable and were a key application within the organization. This flies in the face of the common perception that we live in an age where only projects with a strong ROI projection get funded.
While I was surprised by how high the Saas usage is, on reflection it makes sense. Saas is more likely to break through in new application areas, rather than penetrating established markets that have traditional licence deployment models. And, the Saas pay-as-you-go pricing model lets business units take on projects without the help of the IT organization. Saas allows business units to fly under the radar, with no capital investment in IT required. Who care’s about ROI projections – spend a few thousand dollars, try it for a couple of months, if there’s no value, pull the plug and move on.
