Attensity Extends Market Leadership With Release of Complete Text Analytics Suite.

Attensity 4 Integrates Attensity's Multiple Applications and Adds Seamless Searching, Exploring, and Charting of Unstructured Data 

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Attensity[TM], the innovator in Text Analytics software solutions, today launched the market's first complete Text Analytics suite. Named Attensity 4, the application suite includes new methods of searching, querying, charting, and graphing freeform text dynamically in an easy-to-use, browser-based interface. The suite also unifies and greatly expands existing capabilities from Attensity's awarding winning Text Analytics suite.

Attensity 4 enables government agencies and large corporations to quickly discover, analyze and share accurate, actionable information from millions of unstructured documents. This milestone release improves usability, adds functionality, enhances results, streamlines collaboration, and increases interoperability with other applications.

"Attensity 4 is the culmination of more than 10 years of hard work and deep insight into Text Analytics," said Craig Norris, chief executive officer of Attensity. "We consulted extensively with our government and corporate customers to create the first Text Analytics suite that enables seamless decision support on your text without requiring extensive knowledge engineering. Attensity 4 puts the full power of Text Analytics into the hands of the business user."

Unified Architecture

Attensity 4 is built on a unified architecture and a single data model. All the applications are integrated and use common commands. At its core is Attensity Server, which provides the widest variety of text extraction technologies available in the market. Attensity Discover and Attensity Analytics were previously available as separate applications. Their capabilities for freeform text exploration and analysis were enhanced and integrated into Attensity 4 as a set of seamless modules. New modules for this release are Attensity Text Search and Attensity Manage. They add familiar text search and application management functionality to the unified, business-oriented suite.

Though the entire suite is designed for business users, power users have access to integrated expert tools, including the Knowledge Engineering Workbench for fine-tuning extractions to meet specific needs. Additional new modules are Attensity Integration for straightforward connections with other applications and Attensity Manage for administrative security and overall system operations.

Attensity 4 works inside, alongside, or outside an organization's current business intelligence applications and delivers actionable results from a organization's unstructured data. Attensity 4 offers business users intuitive and comprehensive workflow options. The suite's new home screen includes menus to access all major tasks, a filing cabinet of commonly used reports, system alerts, and queries. An active alert window highlights emerging trends and provides workflows targeted toward potential problem areas.

New Attensity Text Search Offering

For the first time, text search is integrated into the workflow. Search results can be viewed as links to documents ranked by relevancy, to hot spots of prevalent text strings inside documents, and to other relevant words. The searches themselves don't require exact matches to provide accurate results. Queries can be entered as a word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph.

Moreover, users can mine search results for important, subtle or even coded facts using Attensity's Discover and Analytics features. For example, a user can search every document fed into the application for the phrase "O-ring failures." The user can then analyze all of the detailed facts connected to "O-ring failures." These facts can then be viewed, analyzed, parsed, or combined to discover the cause of failures, where they happened, when the actions occurred, and so on.

(For more information about Attensity Text Search, see today's other press release, "Attensity 4 Integrates Text Search into Text Analytics Suite.")

Significant Enhancements to Attensity's Current Applications

Greatly enhanced, Attensity Discover combines the patented power of Exhaustive Extraction[TM] with targeted engines including Entity Extraction, Event Extraction, Keywords, and Directed Learning extraction. This enables users to view location entity output and then understand all of the key facts about the locations extracted. Users can also view everything attached to an event - the facts, elements, modes, actors, actions, objects, entities, categories and structured data made available in the dataset. This synchronized view creates a mini-story from the text. Users can save and share these mini-stories. They can run saved queries against newly extracted text. They can even export the analyzed output into standard spreadsheets or business intelligence applications for further analysis and distribution.

Attensity Analytics is also enhanced and integrated into the workflow. Users can delve deeper into issues they uncover with new bar, pie, cumulative chart and co-occurrence analysis capabilities. Users can include structured data in their analysis, enabling them to analyze, for example, issues found in the unstructured data for a specific customer segment or product line.

Attensity Server's new wizards expedite setups with point-and-click simplicity. Users can schedule imports, extractions and queries into a queue. Coupled with the application's new multi-threading enhancements, which double processing throughput over the previous stand-alone server, import processes and export runs can be batched for more efficient and effective results. Attensity 4 is even designed to enable customers to harness server farms to manage variable workloads and scale installations effectively.

More features requested by customers and included in Attensity 4 are:

* Attensity Manage to classify users as administrators, authors or read-only viewers for enhanced security,

* "Breadcrumbs," a horizontal trail of links across the top of the page,

* Enhancements to the existing extraction engine library,

* Expansion of entity libraries in an atomic architecture, and

* Categorization for "nested" hierarchies to organize and report on fact analysis of text.

"In order to fully understand the state of their business, their customers, or their research, organizations need to combine and mine both their data and their text," said Sue Feldman, IDC's VP for content technologies. "Text Analytics does for text what business intelligence does for data. It moves beyond search to turn text into data that can be analyzed. It is the next frontier in managing information. Attensity stands out in its ability to automate the process and reduce the manual work that is associated with implementing text analytics."

Extended Platform Support

The Attensity 4 release will initially support MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, the Teradata data warehouse and Oracle. The first operating systems supported will be Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Linux.

Standard Interfaces

Attensity 4 ships with a Web services SOAP interface, a published Java API and UIMA annotator for full accessibility and interoperability between the extraction engines and third-party applications for ETL (extracting, transforming and loading), data warehousing, and business intelligence. UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) is an open source framework published by IBM to promote a standard for connecting text analytics applications that process unstructured information. Attensity also provides support for WSDL (Web Services Description Language). In Attensity's software development kit, the company provides the instructions for deploying the Attensity web services layer, and for getting the WSDL that describes the web services that are available.

Availability

Select customers are testing a beta version of Attensity 4 now. General availability from Attensity and its partners will begin in mid-October. Customers can license the modules in Attensity 4, which include Attensity Text Search, Attensity Discover, Attensity Analytics, Attensity Server and Attensity Manage. Additionally, Business Objects, IBM and Teradata sales representatives can discuss comprehensive analytic solutions that integrate Attensity's technology into data warehousing, ETL and business intelligence systems.

It has been estimated that more than 85 percent of all business information exists as unstructured data - everything from customer emails to service notes to surveillance reports. According to IDC's October 2005 report "Text Mining: Mining for Gold in Unstructured Information" (#CA1503SWD), the worldwide market for natural language understanding software products, which includes Text Analytics, is estimated to reach $1.84 billion by 2008.

About Attensity[TM]

Text Analytics software and solutions from Attensity rapidly and accurately transform unstructured data into valuable, actionable information. Attensity enables Global 2000 enterprises and government agencies to extract facts from freeform text, integrate them with structured data, and analyze 100 percent of data seamlessly using Attensity applications or existing business intelligence applications of choice. The company's patented Exhaustive Extraction[TM] technology speeds detection and response to critical events and issues related to intelligence analysis, money laundering, fraud detection, insurance claims analytics, customer care, and service and warranty analysis. Attensity teams with Business Objects, IBM, and Teradata to offer comprehensive solutions integrated with data warehousing and business intelligence systems. Attensity was named to Fortune's "25 Breakout Companies" in 2005 and is among Intelligent Enterprise's "Companies to Watch" in 2006. Attensity is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. with a technology center in Salt Lake City, Utah. More information is at http://www.attensity.com.