An interesting development in the Business Intelligence (BI) marketplace was the acquisition of Inxight by Business Objects (BOBJ). As a spin-off of Xerox PARC, Inxight has been noted for its deep technology in text analysis and visualization. Although it sold packages to many corporations, the primary business model was based on OEM technology licensing to larger software vendors who then incorporates juicy tech-tidbits into established product lines.
What is the leverage of these tech-tidbits for BOBJ? Adam Binnie, Senior Director of Product Management, explained that a key tech-tidbit is Awareness Server, which has been part of Inxight's SmartDiscovery line.
The capabilities are impressive! Using a federated search across internal/external and structured/unstructured information, Awareness Server compiles the results in a meaningful manner using content filtering and relevance ranking. As an impressive addition, the View by Concept display organizes search results into a visual tree structure of matching categories.
It is obvious that the text analysis capability of Awareness Server is world-class. There is a lot of potential here to enhance the BOBJ product line with a unified search tool, making this powerful technology pervasive within corporate BI.
Many vendors have attempted to incorporate text analysis into mainstream BI tools but often with disappointing outcomes. What will be different about BOBJ's effort? Or, will these gems gather dust in the bottom levels of some menu selection? A key issue is the degree of deep integration of Awareness Server into the Universe metadata. Will I be able to search (query) into my data warehouse as a big semantic web using the BOBJ infrastructure?
We should watch these developments at BOBJ.
Posted July 27, 2007 10:58 AM
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