Others have reported on this year's Text Analytics Summit: the prevalence of Voice of the {customer | Market | Patient} as a theme, the focus on sentiment analysis and on BI integration, the vendor announcements, applications for analysis of social media data, and so on. This commentary is helpful so I'll link to it in this article, and I have additional observations to share, drawn from summit discussions, concerning the evolution of the text-analytics market.
Start with links for blog postings and articles:
- Barney Beal of SearchCRM.com
- Jeff Catlin of Lexalytics
- Frank Diana of Enherent
- Fern Halper from Hurwitz & Associates
- Matthew Hurst from Microsoft Live Labs
- Jeff Kelly of SearchDataManagement.com
- Curt Monash (multiple) in Text Technologies
- Nick Patience from the 451 Group
- Mark Sopher of Alluvial Labs
- Katey Wood from the 451 Group
If you've posted a summit write-up that I haven't listed, just let me know and I'll add a link.
I had asked the summit's End User Panel participants to describe something unexpected, something surprising, they had learned using text analytics. I'll save their responses for another time, but pursuing that theme, here are a few surprises I encountered:
First, amazingly, Sue Feldman from IDC, Fern Halper from Hurwitz & Associates, and I were in rough agreement on the size of the text-analytics market, about $200-$250 million annually. We really differed a bit only on exactly what the market-sizing covers beyond software licensing. We each place continued annual growth somewhere in the 25%-50% range, which incidentally far outpaces BI-market growth projections. (The fourth member of the Analyst Panel, Nick Patience from the 451 Group, explained that his firm doesn't publish market-size numbers.) (I offer a bit more by way of market outlook in my pre-summit white paper, Text Technologies in the Mainstream.)
