A new report from Hurwitz & Associates seeks to put text analytics vendors in context. In an environment where unstructured text accounts for 80 percent of the data available to companies, the market analyst and research firm has prepared a Victory Index to help companies suss out who can best help them get value from this information.

By providing the ability to analyze unstructured text, extract relevant information, and transform it into structured information, “text analytics has become a key component of a highly competitive company’s analytics arsenal,” write report authors Fern Halper, partner and principal analyst; Marcia Kaufman, COO and principal analyst; and Daniel Kirsh, senior analyst. Often, the research firm notes, companies begin to experiment with text analytics to gain insight into the unstructured text that abounds in social media, and from that move on to other use cases. For instance, they’ll discover value in mining unstructured data and using it with structured data to improve predictive models.

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OpenText recently announced “delivery of its comprehensive vision for Customer Experience Management that addresses the needs of marketers and the challenges of managing major global brands. To complete this vision, the company has formed an alliance with VML, one of the world’s top digital marketing agencies, bringing together the full range of OpenText Customer Experience Management technologies with VML’s creative and implementation capabilities.” Read more

A recent article announces that OpenText has released “a new version of OpenText Integration Center featuring an enhanced, native connector to OpenText ECM Suite 2010. Customers can help better leverage their structured and unstructured content to reduce costs and improve efficiency. OpenText Integration Center unifies access to multiple sources of disparate information from OpenText ECM Suite for applications such as business systems integration, legacy decommissioning, in-place content management and content migration.” Read more

Since Nstein was acquired by OpenText a little over a year ago, work has been underway to build the former’s semantic technology for text mining and analytics and search into the latter’s enterprise content management platform. So far, that’s resulted in adding Semantic Navigation, the on-premise or cloud web site search and content discovery solution, to OpenText’s Web content management (WCM) products, such as OpenText Web Experience Management and Web Site Management.

This covers aspects such as content tagging and semantic faceting at the content and document levels. This year and the following should see further integration of Nstein technologies into the OpenText solutions set, as well as some new offerings emerging to support other use cases.

As an example, the company is working on a listening platform application, drawing on work Nstein had done for the Canadian government’s public health agency that used its Text Mining Engine to identify potential threats to human health by scouring multiple sources — including news aggregators like Factiva – that were parsed for about 1,000 or so concepts such as “mysterious ailments” and “outbreak.” It’s building up a framework for ingesting different data sources to support this, says Charles-Olivier Simard, product manager for semantic technologies at OpenText.

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