PRESS RELEASE
Contacts:
Stephen
Hatch
Lisa Hawes
Attensity
Corporation
Sterling Communications
(650)
433-1713
(408) 395-5500
shatch@attensity.com
lhawes@sterlingpr.com
Attensity
Teams with IBM to Enable Government and Commercial Organizations to Access
Unstructured Data for Analytics
Companies
Combine on UIMA Framework to Transform Unstructured Data into Structured
Elements, Facilitating Broad New Array of Text Analytics Solutions and Faster,
More Accurate Search Results
PALO
ALTO, Calif., August 8, 2005
— Attensity, the innovator in software applications that analyze text, today announced it is working
with IBM to market text analytics solutions as a
member of IBM’s PartnerWorld Industry Networks. Attensity will use the
open Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) standard and also
support implementation with IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind
Edition. Attensity’s software supports UIMA to provide customer service, product
quality and compliance solutions for global 2000 companies within a wide variety
of industries ranging from manufacturing to hospitality to financial services,
and entity, relationship and fact extraction capabilities for government
intelligence agencies.
UIMA
is an open framework published by IBM to promote a standard for connecting text
analytics applications that process unstructured information to discover the
latent meaning, relationships and relevant facts buried in documents, problem
reports, e-mails, web sites and other information sources. UIMA’s standard
interface spurs a new level of interoperability among the developers of text
analytics, search, and business intelligence, and provides tools for developers
to speed the creation of new, reusable text analytics components. Attensity’s
open, service-oriented architecture, combined with its newly released software
developer’s kit, makes Attensity’s compliance with the UIMA framework possible.
(See press release issued today, “Attensity Delivers Open Source Standards
Architecture to Enable Text Analytics Across the
Enterprise.”)
“We’re
very excited to work with IBM,” said Craig Norris, chief executive officer of
Attensity. “It has always been our goal to team with companies that share a
similar commitment to improving how organizations derive value from their
information. The UIMA framework enables companies to leverage Attensity software
to extract the most pertinent information from their unstructured text in the
shortest amount of time. UIMA allows developers to access Attensity’s
capabilities across a wide range of analytic applications, not only business
intelligence and text analytics, but search functions as well. The fact that IBM
has announced its intent to open source UIMA will foster developments that will
benefit the industry as a whole.”
By
leveraging UIMA, Attensity is able to illustrate integration with IBM WebSphere
Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, including the ability to communicate
facts about documents found in search results. Attensity’s software enables companies
like Whirlpool to improve product quality and customer service by giving them
the ability to uncover the facts they need — the who, what, where, when, and why
— from customer and technician notes.
Attensity has extended this ability to provide the facts in a WebSphere
Information Integrator OmniFind search result. This allows users to get more
accurate results without first having to “educate” the search. The combined
solution enables rapid integration across technologies and platforms in a
variety of different deployment options, to extract deeper levels of meaning,
including the relationships that define specific facts.
“IBM
is very pleased to have the participation of Attensity in the UIMA project,”
said Nelson Mattos, distinguished engineer, vice president strategy, IBM
Information Integration. “Attensity’s approach for extracting facts from
unstructured data is of great value to the market. Incorporating Attensity’s
text analytics capabilities into WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind
Edition provides additional value to organizations by enabling more accurate
search results.”
In
addition, utilization of the UIMA framework allows Factiva, a provider of essential business news and information
content, to be better equipped to serve key roles and verticals, such as
government and intelligence agencies. Attensity and
Factiva have joined forces to help analysts in the government sector uncover
hidden patterns in information provided by Factiva and other
sources.
Said
Greg Gerdy, vice
president and director of channel marketing and strategy, Factiva, “IBM’s framework equips Factiva and its UIMA-compliant
software partners such as Attensity to serve key roles and multiple vertical
markets.”
Structured
information is data that easily fits into the rows and tables of a database for
simplified query and reporting. However, unstructured text — estimated at some
80 percent of all information — represents the largest and fastest-growing
information source available to business and government organizations.
Unstructured information can be found in the body of documents, e-mails and
their attachments, blogs, field reports, customer surveys, Internet news feeds
and warranty claims. Oftentimes, this unstructured information is stored in
numerous different repositories scattered throughout the enterprise and is
rarely in a centralized location. Unlike web-based documents that usually
contain links, making them easier to index, the structure for indexing is absent
in unstructured data. By
incorporating the UIMA standard into Attensity’s text analytics solutions,
Attensity is ensuring its customers can better perform the tasks of indexing,
analyzing and extracting high value information from documents, thereby
enhancing the scope and quality of analytical reporting, querying and
searching.
“Attensity’s
text analytics software has been instrumental in helping us manage and maintain
our customer data and product performance information,” said Tom Welke, vice
president and general manager of the NAR Operations Team at Whirlpool. “Since
deploying Attensity’s software, we’ve been able to identify potential product
issues more quickly and have addressed them before they became real problems for
our customers. The UIMA standard, coupled with Attensity and IBM’s software,
should allow us to increase the number of people that can benefit and learn from
these insights, offering us a greater ability to identify hidden issues and
improve product quality.”
About
Attensity
Attensity
Corporation provides innovative software applications that seamlessly integrate
and analyze both structured and unstructured information for commercial
enterprises and government agencies. The company’s solutions are the first to
fuse structured and unstructured data, enabling organizations to speed detection
and response to critical events and issues that, until now, have been difficult
to discover or resolve. Attensity numbers government intelligence agencies and
Global 2000 companies among its customers. Attensity has been named one of
FORTUNE Magazine's 25 Breakout Companies of 2005.
Attensity has its corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., and a
technology center in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, please visit www.attensity.com.