BeyeNETWORK: Text Analytics Opportunities and Challenges for 2010.

My year-ago item,Perspectives on Text Analytics in 2009, was my second-most-viewed BeyeNETWORK article last year. On the assumption that those readers weren’tallemployees of the vendors I quoted, given reader interest, I thought I’d revisit the topic. After all, users benefit by knowing what vendor executives are seeing and planning for the year ahead. Given the nature of the text-analytics market – solutions are not standardized, much less commoditized – customers invest much more than money when they sign with a vendor, and they want to remain sure they’ll invest well.

No single solution provider dominates text analytics. No single provider dominates any significant text-analytics market segment: not customer experience, media and publishing, financial services and insurance, intelligence, life sciences, or e-discovery. This is good news for current and prospective users. Each provider, to stay competitive, has to innovate, to stay ahead of evolving customer requirements. Further good news, judging from provider financial results and from my discussions with end users, is that most vendors are on target. They have done a good job tracking and meeting emerging needs. They need to stay on track in 2010.

So I posed to vendor executives the same question as last year, just updated by a year:

• What are the Organizational Limits to Analytics in SCRM? (customerthink.com)
• The best investment text analytics can buy… (customerthink.com)
• QVC Deploys Clarabridge Text Analytics Solution To Gain Real-Time Customer Intelligence (eon.businesswire.com)
• SAS Text Analytics and Teragram (arnoldit.com)