IBM delivers unstructured data-analysis tools to monitor a company's public image
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/1/2006 7:00:00 AM
Some of the most valuable information about a company isn't even in its possession—it's what others are saying about the company in unstructured content on the Web. And even if it is in the company's possession, it's unaggregated, buried deep in corporate systems.
The question is how does a company effectively retrieve this information? IBMsays it is leveraging a new platform that employs patented data management, predictive mining, and analysis technologies to unearth it.
"There's a lot of data out there in unstructured format, making it difficult to do analysis or reporting for," says Marc Andrews, IBM's director of strategy and business content discovery. "We wanted to make sure this new platform can identify key topics and categorize whether people are talking about services, products, or financial information. Or in automotive, for example, whether it's gas mileage, or interior and exterior design."
IBM's first tailored applications are IBM Quality Insight for Automotive, and Public Imaging Monitoring, used primarily for marketing purposes. The underlying platform that powers the applications exploits text analytics and search software in IBM's WebSphere Information OmniFind Edition, coupled with its Unstructured Information Management Architecture, an open framework for building domain-specific analytic applications that can process text within documents and elsewhere, including audio and video clips, and Internet blogs for latent meaning.
"You need to efficiently understand what people are saying, then aggregate it and provide drill-down capabilities to key topics to get the sentiment and tone of what they're saying," Andrews says. "There are companies that do this as a service, but what IBM brings to the table is the value of broader applicability of the capabilities."
The Public Imagine Monitoring solution enables users to track and monitor new product launches and the response they generate in the market, including commentary in Internet blogs.
"The technology allows you to extract information and identify what the issues are. If you can identify problems sooner, you can protect revenues streams," Andrews says.
IBM says it is now working with Morgan Stanley on a prototype to help the financial services firm track the public image of companies its analysts track.
