Business Objects Unveils Search, Text Analysis Software For Unstructured Data
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TechWeb - The new capabilities gives BO customers a unified set of tools for accessing structured and unstructured data from the company&#39;s business intelligence platform. The new products stem from the acquisition of Inxight Software in july.
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IBM's Atlas tool aims to help businesses visualize connections between colleagues.
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Hosted CRM company introduces a new framework for linking analysis tools to its applications.Image: Salesforce dashboard
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Business Objects is stepping up its efforts in the area of corporate performance management software with an acquisition and the integration of some existing applications with its business intelligence suite.
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Business Objects released new software WednesdayÂ that combines EPM (enterprise performance management), BI, and data integration into a comprehensive suite aimed at CFOs and business finance managers.
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A new search engine, slated to be completed by the end of 2007, uses natural language techniques to better interpret the meaning of the information a user is seeking, and thus provide more relevant results.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM's India Research Laboratory has developed technology for retrieval and integration of information from both structured and unstructured data. The new technology integrates data that is currently stored in separate silos, Mukesh Mohania, lead researcher on the project, said on Wednesday. "We are leveraging the structured data by extracting the information from the unstructured repositories, and then providing rich business intelligence on this consolidated information," Mohania said. A research prototype of the technology has been deployed in the customer support operations of HDFC Bank, a large private bank in Mumbai. The prototype application integrates customer data from a structured database and business intelligence sources, with incoming information on customers from multiple sources, including e-mails and phone calls. The lab decided to use the new technology at HDFC Bank to validate it in a real, operational environment, Mohania said. IBM announced Wednesday it will offer the technology early next year. The middleware software developed on Java technology currently runs on Linux, but can be ported on to any Java compliant operating system, Mohania said. The technology can be used in other areas of an enterprise, besides customer relationship management, where there is both structured and unstructured data to be integrated and analyzed, he said. ByÂ  automaticallyÂ  combiningÂ  structured and unstructured information, HDFC BankÂ canÂ provideÂ callÂ center agents with a more complete history of all customerÂ activityÂ soÂ they are aware of information that has already been shared through previous interactions, IBM said. The technology also enables HDFC Bank to generate newÂ contextual and actionable insights that can be used to automate tasks, enhanceÂ up-sellingÂ andÂ cross-sellingÂ opportunities,Â andÂ improve agent performance, it added. EROCS (Entity Recognition in the Context of Structured data) is a key component of the technology developed by the lab. EROCS addresses the problem of linking a document with related structured data in an external relational database. Partial information provided, for example, in e-mails from customers do not often allow identification of the entity, such as the customer, in the structured data, Mohania said. EROCS views the structured data in the relational database as a set of predefined entities, and identifies the entities from this set that best match the given document, he added. A highlight of EROCS is that it identifies an entity even if it is not explicitly mentioned in the document, according to Mohania. It exploits the context information present in the document to match and identify the entities, Mohania added. Another technology, called SCORE (Symbiotic Content Oriented information Retrieval) addresses the problem of consolidated querying of structured and unstructured data, using a type of contextual search. The application specifies its information needs using a SQL query on the structured data, and this query is automatically "translated" into a set of keywords that can be used to retrieve relevant unstructured data. At the core of this technology lies a technique for obtaining these keywords from not only the query result, but also from additional "neighborhood" related information in the underlying database, Mohania said.
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NetSuite 10.0 offers analysis tools to help businesses predict information about customers based on data they've already entered.
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People search that connects users to chat to find answers.
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Information Builders Inc has launched a navigation tool called Magnify that lets users organize and link search results to relevant business intelligence reports and analysis.
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We need a search engine to find all the search engines. Two more Web-query services launched recently, Accoona and Blingo; their initial performance, however, suggests
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SAP AG unwrapped its Enterprise Search application to help customers conduct specific secure queries of structured and unstructured data held in both SAP and non-SAP software.
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IBM released Atlas, a software toolset that provides advanced search and analysis functions for its enterprise social networking product, Lotus Connections, on Tuesday.&quot;Atlas looks at the data within Connections and does some visualizations of the information,&quot; said Chris Lamb, senior product manager. &quot;The main point is that it is a way to visualize the social data from a line-of-business perspective and a personal level.&quot;The Atlas suite contains four components dubbed My Net, Find, Reach, and Net.The Net component provides a view of groups that have formed within an organization due to work on similar projects, IBM said. The point is to help users find ways to improve communications among various nodes throughout the company. My Net provides a similar view but focuses on a user&#39;s personal network.Atlas also includes Reach, a dashboard-like tool that helps users &quot;navigate the six degrees of separation that divide them from a colleague,&quot; as an IBM statement describes. The purpose is to help workers more quickly connect with people in the organization who have a particular skill set or area of knowledge.The last component is Find, which can provide search results that leverage social networking-related data, such as blogs and reporting structures, according to IBM.Atlas and Lotus Connections fit into an ambitious push by IBM around social collaboration in enterprises.A growing number of people use multiple networks and would like to easily move their profile data between them. Without providing specifics, Lamb said IBM is moving to address the problem.&quot;That&#39;s something that we&#39;re looking at, how we aggregate that,&quot; he said. &quot;There will be some announcements around the Lotusphere time frame.&quot; Lotusphere is scheduled for Jan. 20-24 in Orlando, Florida.IBM is selling Atlas through its Software Services for Lotus group. Lamb declined to provide specific pricing information.
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(InfoWorld) - Companies that want to move beyond cutting and pasting information into Excel spreadsheets will have to adopt a set of APIs and create lightweight mashup applications that automate business processes, executives said during a Webcast Thursday. The event was a first of a projected series of online discussions hosted by software provider Nexaweb, which also announced a partnership with Kapow Technologies. Under the agreement, Kapow will help companies implement its Mashup Server, a visual scripting tool for making Web 2.0 applications, along with Nexaweb's platform, whose platform focuses on AJAX (asynchronous Java and XML) within service-oriented data systems. The idea is that companies that are trying to create a more efficient IT environment based on SOA could also develop online applications that tie into those systems. Kapow Technologies CTO Stefan Andreasen said the partnership would facilitate the creation of so-called enterprise mashups, which combine services in network-based data into multiple applications and make them available through a dashboard of some kind. These kinds of tools make it much easier for companies to offer self-service features to their users, he said, while making use of existing IT infrastructure. "This is not a competition with SOA but a complement that meets a different set of needs," he said. The mashups will give users better-automated tasks and the ability to deliver software programs more quickly, Andreasen said. They would in essence be what developers are calling RIAs that use APIs, such as SOAP and RSS, and offer a downloadable "offline" mode as well as an online one. "The number-one obstacle is to get access to the data," he said. "A lot of enterprises have 6,000 internal Web applications with no API ... the information the knowledge workers have is only what they can personally see on their screen." Nexaweb's chief architect, Bob Buffone, said the prime candidates for enterprise mashups will be complex, composite applications with dynamic, non-linear workflows. "We're not talking about (spreadsheets) with a few rows of information. We're talking about data that has thousands of rows that need to be updated in real-time," he said, using the example of a foreign exchange application that has to update information about currency prices with minimal latency. "Right now in companies, there's a lot of heads-down data entry. These kinds of applications will need something that doesn't require a mouse, more of a tab-type interface." Buffone said it will be important that enterprise mashups leverage existing code tools, and development infrastructure and build on the paradigms that are already in place. The goal is to create software that has the performance of a desktop application but can be deployed in a browser -- or just on a PC. "This concept of offline Web application is going to grow predominantly in the enterprise," he predicted. "No one can always be sure the Internet is going to be there when they use their application." Although some firms have been making their own mashups on an ad-hoc basis, Andreasen suggested that is going to change. "To make this work well, you will need a mashup infrastructure and products in place to leverage the opportunity," he said. Nexaweb will be hosting its next Webcast, on securing Web 2.0 applications, next Thursday. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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Masala, an add-on to IBM's DB2 database, queries far-flung info sources on company networks.
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Revamped search engine allows users to store and share results.
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The search engine is good for more than just scouring the Web. It's also a powerful tool for the shadier side of online data collection.