Attensity Analyze 5.5 Release Provides Large-Scale Data Grid Offering for Voice of the Customer Analytics

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Attensity™, the leader in Customer Experience Management software applications that generate value from unstructured text, today announced the release of Attensity Analyze 5.5 with the Attensity Data Grid computing system. Enabling rapid and easy analytics on larger scale data sets with improved performance, Attensity Analyze 5.5 allows enterprise companies to transform multi-channel customer conversations in emails, web forums, surveys, CRM notes, social media and more into actionable insights.

"With the rise in volume of social media and other conversation channels, being able to process and explore massive quantities of text to derive insights in near-real time is critical," said Catherine van Zuylen, Attensity's vice president of product management. "Attensity Analyze 5.5 can help bridge the gaps between customer service, research, social media teams, marketing teams, and others who can leverage customer information as a business asset. Enterprises can now use Attensity's easy-to-use built-in exploration system as their system of record to understand and project from years of customer data from thousands of sources, with reduced storage costs and increased accessibility."

Predictive Models Fed By Deep Text Analytics

Attensity's massive scale also allows for improved predictive modeling, based on years of cross-channel customer conversations. Indications of intent to churn, commit fraud, recommend products, or change purchasing behavior is hidden in unstructured data. With Attensity Analyze 5.5, users will be able to leverage the power of Attensity's text analytics engines to find these indicators, combined with the power of predictive modeling applications such as SAS or IBM SPSS.  A new module that acts as an interface between Attensity Analyze and predictive models is also included in the release.

"Our research(1) revealed that contextual information such as CRM verbatims, online content and even emails between organizations and their customers are seldom analyzed or even shared with the same roles that perform quantitative customer survey analysis," stated Leslie Ament, research vice president for customer intelligence strategies at Hypatia Research. "When turning customer voices into customer insights, organizational challenges center on 1) finding the right 'customer signal' within high velocity volumes of contextual information, 2) analyzing and disseminating critical decision-support insights to key personnel, and 3) creating an operationally-executable plan (i.e. structured business processes) for leveraging VOC insights. By addressing these challenges, Attensity supports organizations that seek to proactively utilize comprehensive customer insight," said Ament. 

Self-Learning Classification Simplifies Knowledge Engineering

By combining industry-specific classification sets with a set of new utilities, Attensity Analyze 5.5 also makes it easier for knowledge engineers to custom-tailor their Attensity solution to meet their ever-changing requirements. This makes it simpler than ever before to monitor new product launches, understand sentiment around emerging issues, and react to market and business conditions.

Attensity Data Grid Capabilities

As unstructured data grows – fueled by the growth in social media and other customer feedback sources such as surveys, online communities, and more – Attensity Analyze 5.5 serves as a solution to keep more data online (scales to hundreds of terabytes) to quickly look at, analyze, and compare customer data elements over time and in mass quantity. Attensity's in-depth, patented text analysis of customer data sources enables users to be able to ask deep questions such as:

• Are there new and emerging service issues occurring?
• What is the root cause of a product issue?
• Can you tell me which customers will recommend us to others?
• Has product quality declined or improved over time?

Coupled with the Attensity Data Grid, Attensity Analyze 5.5 performs between five and 180 times faster than relational queries (depending on the query and RDBMS vendor), and at 1/35th the input/output (I/O) of existing relational systems.

As a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Platform for executing queries issued by Attensity Analyze, the Attensity Data Grid combines hardware computing resources with software layered on top that coordinates work and administration of the grid. The Attensity Data Grid also operates as a Column Store solution where data is compressed, greatly decreasing both the I/O required to read data and the cost of storage.

Additional benefits of Attensity Analyze 5.5 include:

• Continued ability to support RDBMS vendors (Teradata, Oracle, SQLServer) and standard database interfaces (JDBC, ODBC)
• Time savings on queries to execute, equating to more user productivity
• Ability to design a grid for a personalized environment that conforms to the user's performance, volume, and user requirements
• Addition of capacity and performance to the user's existing, running system
• Ability to manage 5 to 50 times the data with 20 times less storage
• Simultaneous loading and querying
• Easy deployment and maintenance

Attensity Analyze 5.5 will be generally available on Monday, January 31. Demonstrations and pricing are available upon request.

Attensity Accolades and Events

Attensity was recognized by customer intelligence analyst firm Hypatia Research as a top ranked provider of Voice of the Customer solutions and honored to place within Hypatia's Galaxy™ evaluations.

Attensity's solutions will be exhibited at two events running simultaneously January 24-27: Attensity will be at booth #605 at the Microstrategy World Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, as well as at the IQPC Call Center Summit in Orlando, Florida, with partner Contact Centers of America.

Attensity also hosts a monthly, complimentary webinar series on a variety of industry topics. The most recent webinar, "Using the Voice of the Customer to Predict Your Customer Behavior," was led by Attensity's director of advanced analytics, Manya Mayes. All archived webinars can be viewed at http://www.attensity.com/news-events/events/webinars/.

About Attensity

Attensity delivers an integrated suite of Customer Experience Management software applications to meet the demands of a new breed of empowered consumers. Attensity's solutions are powered by semantic technologies that allow organizations to Listen, Analyze, Relate and Act (LARA) on information trapped in the unstructured text of multi-channel customer conversations. The comprehensive suite of applications addresses collective intelligence in social media and forums; the voice of the customer in surveys, e-mails and other customer contact points; web and call center customer response management; and web self-service. Thanks to Attensity, customers experience relevant, effective, fast and positive one-on-one interactions with companies, resulting in increased loyalty and satisfaction. With more than 500 installations worldwide, Attensity's award-winning software supports 10,000-plus users in large government agencies and such innovative enterprises as Airbus, Bosch, Charles Schwab, JetBlue, Royal Bank of Canada, Siemens, Travelocity and Whirlpool. More information is at http://blog.attensity.com/, http://twitter.com/attensity and http://www.facebook.com/attensity.

©2011 Attensity Group. Attensity is a trademark of Attensity Group in the United States and/or other countries. Other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Information is subject to change without notice. All rights reserved.

(1) ©2011 Hypatia Research, LLC "Operationalizing Voice of the Customer: Maturity Levels, Benchmarks & Best Practices."

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