Today’s hypercompetitive organizations need a single, unified view of enterprise data—both structured and unstructured—with which to make fully informed business decisions. They require complete traceability and access to all levels of the data without compromising data integrity and performance in order to optimize analysis, understanding and action regarding critical business issues. Attensity and Teradata have joined together to provide just that, a single view of the business through the combination of Attensity’s Text Analytics solutions and Teradata’s enterprise data warehouse (EDW).

Business organizations and government agencies have spent years developing systems and processes for capturing, storing, maintaining and mining data. These systems have historically been focused on mining only about 15% of the data, most typically the structured data found in various financial, procurement, customer service and human resource applications located across the organization.

In addition to this coded and numeric data stored in rows and columns, operational data often contains considerable amounts of free-form text derived from call center and repair notes, claim descriptions, employee reviews, e-mail content, reports, news feeds and more. This free-form text contains invaluable information about the organization, including customer and product feedback, leading performance indicators, problem descriptions, indicators of important business trends and even suspicious relationships. However, because this information is in a format that cannot be readily processed by most analytic applications, it typically remains underused. The result is that many organizations are unable to leverage analytics that include all of their collected data, analytics that can have a significant impact on their business performance or the success of their agency’s imperatives.

A powerful combination
The close Attensity and Teradata partnership creates a powerful combined solution that integrates all of the information within an organization (both structured and unstructured) and provides a highly scalable environment for accessing and analyzing large volumes of data. Attensity is able to parse, extract and analyze the previously inaccessible unstructured data, fuse it with the structured data found in a Teradata data warehouse for analysis, and deliver to organizations a complete, single view of their business. Users can now make more accurate and well-informed operational decisions using all of their data. In addition, the availability of cross-functional information offers the ability not only to identify product issues or problematic activity, but also to understand the events and details surrounding them to dramatically shorten the problem “detection-to-correction” cycle. The results:

	Improved process visibility
	Accelerated identification of adverse events
	Compressed problem detection-to-correction cycles
	Streamlined determination of responsible parties
	Advanced 360-degree business analytics

How Attensity and Teradata work together
The patented Attensity Text Analytics solution provides complementary capabilities to the Teradata EDW solution by enabling it to store, maintain and facilitate 360-degree analysis of the business. Attensity uses linguistic principles to transform free-form text fields into identifiable facts and events in a relational format. Attensity’s solution then fuses the newly found facts from the unstructured data with the structured data, which Teradata makes available to business users in a fully traceable EDW.

Teradata’s single view approach gives organizations the flexibility to look at the business from a variety of perspectives, helping to ensure that consistent, accurate data is available for analysis by people anywhere in the organization. Teradata’s EDW cuts both data duplication and redundant support costs while it delivers a scalable resource that lets organizations keep pace with data volume and freshness, complex and mixed workloads, and a growing number of users.

“The powerful combination of Attensity’s Text Analytics solutions with Teradata’s enterprise data warehouse provides unprecedented access to all of an organization’s data,” said Dan Odette, Teradata’s vice president of global consulting services for the manufacturing sector. “For the first time, manufacturers can truly understand the insights previously locked in their unstructured text, such as repair and service notes and warranty repair information, and utilize this new information to detect and correct problems more quickly. We are seeing customers achieve rapid return on investment [ROI] when leveraging the Attensity products as part of a Teradata solution.”

Nathan Uffenheimer, Teradata’s vice president of global consulting services for finance, insurance and healthcare (FIH) agrees. “The value proposition for customers in the FIH markets is strong,” he said. “With Attensity, they can now get a deeper understanding of what is in their text-based customer notes, claim details and medical records, and effectively act on that information. Because this information is all maintained in the enterprise data warehouse, they can get a single view of their business, which enables them to reduce fraud, increase customer and patient satisfaction, and improve medical practices.”

Attensity’s “fact recognition” software and its patented Exhaustive Extraction™ approach are valuable because they “connect the dots” in ways that enable customers to see and respond to critical issues or events that historically have been very difficult to analyze or even detect. More than search software, Attensity's Text Analytics technology grasps the nuances, relationships and context of everyday language and quickly extracts who did what, when, where and under what conditions. Attensity's fact recognition software automatically and exhaustively extracts valuable pieces of data from free-form text and combines them with structured data, delivering high-value, actionable information, all without extensive knowledge engineering. This process gives decision makers exactly what they need to be responsive or to take precautions against potentially costly—and, in many cases, dangerous—events.

Attensity and Teradata’s combined solution features:

	A comprehensive EDW including structured and unstructured data and information traceability across business lines
	Proven unstructured data extraction and analytics capabilities for providing structure to unstructured data efficiently and accurately
	The unique ability to extract and analyze facts like who, what, where, when and why, and understand how people, places and events are related
	The highest performing, most scalable and manageable enterprise data management technology
	A full suite of data access, analysis and management tools
	Comprehensive integration with leading business intelligence (BI) tools such as Business Objects enables organizations to expand the reach of their business analysis

Bringing a single view of the organization to both government agencies and commercial enterprises
The Attensity-Teradata solution offers complete visibility to both government and commercial organizations. In the government market, agencies leverage the combined solution to create a highly scalable analysis platform to address counter-terrorism, logistics analysis, law enforcement issues and constituent satisfaction. Agencies can better analyze and identify trends and spot information that falls outside the norm because they are operating with a single view of all of the data, both structured and unstructured.

In commercial enterprises, the combined solution provides deeper, more comprehensive analysis that enables product and service companies to improve quality and service levels, control costs and better determine and manage risk. Product companies can configure early warning systems that enable them to address manufacturing and product issues faster, resulting in direct warranty cost savings and reduced recalls. Insurance companies can perform more accurate and timely fraud analysis, and adjust their reserves based on more accurate claims analysis. All companies can improve their customer satisfaction levels and develop better, more targeted products by enabling voice-of-the-customer analysis of their customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) data.

“We see immediate value for our customers when integrating with the Teradata enterprise data warehouse,” said Dr. David L. Bean, CTO and co-founder of Attensity. “Attensity’s Text Analytics solutions perform Exhaustive Extraction on an organization’s unstructured data, turning it into rows and columns of data that is then fused with the related structured data. Teradata’s ability to manage the fused datasets with high performance and availability delivers real value to customers because the resulting datasets can be very large and otherwise difficult to manage.”

Attensity and Teradata’s combined solution benefits:

	Consolidates an enterprise’s structured and unstructured data, providing more informed analysis and decision making
	Delivers greater understanding of product issues, problem root cause and customer interactions, and clearer insight into business trends, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs)
	Allows users to leverage all of the data in the data warehouse, providing a deeper understanding of the business through holistic analytics
	Complements existing reporting, analytics and data mining solutions, incorporating unstructured data while leveraging existing data warehouse investments

To find out more about Attensity and Teradata’s joint solutions and for more information, please visit www.attensity.com, or contact Attensity at (650) 433-1712. T

Teradata Magazine-December 2006