Attensity Teams With IBM to Enable Government and Commercial Organizations to Access Unstructured Data for Analytics.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Companies Combine on UIMA Framework to Transform Unstructured Data Into Structured Elements, Facilitating Broad New Array of Text Analytics Solutions and Faster, More Accurate Search Results

Attensity, the innovator in software applications that analyze text, today announced it is working with IBM to market text analytics solutions as a member of IBM's PartnerWorld Industry Networks. Attensity will use the open Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) standard and also support implementation with IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition. Attensity's software supports UIMA to provide customer service, product quality and compliance solutions for global 2000 companies within a wide variety of industries ranging from manufacturing to hospitality to financial services, and entity, relationship and fact extraction capabilities for government intelligence agencies.

UIMA is an open framework published by IBM to promote a standard for connecting text analytics applications that process unstructured information to discover the latent meaning, relationships and relevant facts buried in documents, problem reports, e-mails, web sites and other information sources. UIMA's standard interface spurs a new level of interoperability among the developers of text analytics, search, and business intelligence, and provides tools for developers to speed the creation of new, reusable text analytics components. Attensity's open, service-oriented architecture, combined with its newly released software developer's kit, makes Attensity's compliance with the UIMA framework possible. (See press release issued today, "Attensity Delivers Open Source Standards Architecture to Enable Text Analytics Across the Enterprise.")

"We're very excited to work with IBM," said Craig Norris, chief executive officer of Attensity. "It has always been our goal to team with companies that share a similar commitment to improving how organizations derive value from their information. The UIMA framework enables companies to leverage Attensity software to extract the most pertinent information from their unstructured text in the shortest amount of time. UIMA allows developers to access Attensity's capabilities across a wide range of analytic applications, not only business intelligence and text analytics, but search functions as well. The fact that IBM has announced its intent to open source UIMA will foster developments that will benefit the industry as a whole."

By leveraging UIMA, Attensity is able to illustrate integration with IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, including the ability to communicate facts about documents found in search results. Attensity's software enables companies like Whirlpool to improve product quality and customer service by giving them the ability to uncover the facts they need -- the who, what, where, when, and why -- from customer and technician notes. Attensity has extended this ability to provide the facts in a WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind search result. This allows users to get more accurate results without first having to "educate" the search. The combined solution enables rapid integration across technologies and platforms in a variety of different deployment options, to extract deeper levels of meaning, including the relationships that define specific facts.

"IBM is very pleased to have the participation of Attensity in the UIMA project," said Nelson Mattos, distinguished engineer, vice president strategy, IBM Information Integration. "Attensity's approach for extracting facts from unstructured data is of great value to the market. Incorporating Attensity's text analytics capabilities into WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition provides additional value to organizations by enabling more accurate search results."

In addition, utilization of the UIMA framework allows Factiva, a provider of essential business news and information content, to be better equipped to serve key roles and verticals, such as government and intelligence agencies. Attensity and Factiva have joined forces to help analysts in the government sector uncover hidden patterns in information provided by Factiva and other sources.

Said Greg Gerdy, vice president and director of channel marketing and strategy, Factiva, "IBM's framework equips Factiva and its UIMA-compliant software partners such as Attensity to serve key roles and multiple vertical markets."

Structured information is data that easily fits into the rows and tables of a database for simplified query and reporting. However, unstructured text -- estimated at some 80 percent of all information -- represents the largest and fastest-growing information source available to business and government organizations. Unstructured information can be found in the body of documents, e-mails and their attachments, blogs, field reports, customer surveys, Internet news feeds and warranty claims. Oftentimes, this unstructured information is stored in numerous different repositories scattered throughout the enterprise and is rarely in a centralized location. Unlike web-based documents that usually contain links, making them easier to index, the structure for indexing is absent in unstructured data. By incorporating the UIMA standard into Attensity's text analytics solutions, Attensity is ensuring its customers can better perform the tasks of indexing, analyzing and extracting high value information from documents, thereby enhancing the scope and quality of analytical reporting, querying and searching.

"Attensity's text analytics software has been instrumental in helping us manage and maintain our customer data and product performance information," said Tom Welke, vice president and general manager of the NAR Operations Team at Whirlpool. "Since deploying Attensity's software, we've been able to identify potential product issues more quickly and have addressed them before they became real problems for our customers. The UIMA standard, coupled with Attensity and IBM's software, should allow us to increase the number of people that can benefit and learn from these insights, offering us a greater ability to identify hidden issues and improve product quality."

About Attensity

Attensity Corporation provides innovative software applications that seamlessly integrate and analyze both structured and unstructured information for commercial enterprises and government agencies. The company's solutions are the first to fuse structured and unstructured data, enabling organizations to speed detection and response to critical events and issues that, until now, have been difficult to discover or resolve. Attensity numbers government intelligence agencies and Global 2000 companies among its customers. Attensity has been named one of FORTUNE Magazine's 25 Breakout Companies of 2005. Attensity has its corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., and a technology center in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, please visit www.attensity.com.