The Market
"Unstructured Data Management - the elephant in the corner"

• Market Landscape

• Market Positioning

• Information and Knowledge Management Market

In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in the electronic data that corporations must manage. Businesses spend an estimated $750 billion annually due to time spent by workers seeking information necessary for them to do their jobs; in 2003, knowledge workers are expected to spend 30-40% of their time just managing documents. IDC[1] estimates that the rate of creation of unstructured corporate data will grow from 100 terabytes per day during 2000, to 1000 terabytes per day by 2005. Every computer user has experienced the frustration of knowing that a document (or email) exists, without being able to locate it.

Information and knowledge management represents the management of both structured data (15% of information) and unstructured data (85% of information). Billions of dollars have been invested in the management of structured data, using technology such as data mining, business intelligence and on-line analytical processing tools to extract value from the data stored in relational databases (e.g. IBM DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server). The unstructured data market is estimated as four times the size of the structured data market and is growing exponentially, thus representing a significant opportunity.

The dilemma faced in attempting to maintain coverage of information, gain understanding and assess relevance of the information has forced the adoption of comprises in the form of filtering and selected sources of information. Software companies have addressed the problem of how users can search, browse, conceptualize, and understand information such as collections of documents. Little attention has been paid to how users might more effectively access, interpret and use the information extracted from the within documents themselves.

The Mole Business Intelligence products are positioned as capabilities for unlocking the value within unstructured data by delivering contextual analysis and abstraction solutions.

Market Landscape

The451[2] in their November 2002 Report – “Unstructured Data Management – the elephant in the corner” categorized the UDM market as follows:

• Content Management

• Search and Retrieval

• Categorization, Taxonomy Generation and Data Visualization

• Collaboration

• XML Databases and Tools

Due to the dynamic nature of the market we are seeing products being delivered across market categories. This is evident through the repackaging of products, acquisition and strategic alliances. It is our observation that the major knowledge management software vendors have been rebranding themselves as suppliers of ‘Enterprise Content Management’ (ECM) solutions. Document management is now marketed as a component of the ECM solution.

Industry and market analysts are indicating that technologies will start to emerge to satisfy the demand for better management of unstructured data. The consensus view currently is that these new technologies will be based on categorization, taxonomy generation, data visualization and search and retrieval with a focus on adding structure to the unstructured data. Taxonomy generation and management is a central component to this proposition as this provides the basis for putting the ‘structure’ around the unstructured data. Interestingly, whilst this provides a basis for searching and retrieving information through the use of categorization and natural language processing techniques, it does not deliver the user a means of navigating or analyzing the content.

The Mole offers business intelligence solutions to satisfy this emerging demand through the integration of a Key Terms Thesaurus (Taxonomy), Content Discovery (Search and Retrieval), Document Classification and Content Analysis platforms.

Market Positioning

The Mole is positioned to extend the capabilities provided by software vendors in the following market categories:

• Content Management
  (Metadata profiling through the use of The Mole Key Terms Manager and Content Profiler to present content properties and matched key word terms)

• Search and Retrieval
  (The Mole Content Analyzer and Discoverer used to present abstracted views of significant content based on the search expression)

• Taxonomy Generation and Data Visualization
  (The Mole Key Terms Manager used to deliver consistent profiling of information and through the management of terminology as it evolves within the organization, provides a platform to future proof an organization’s access to information)

• Categorization
  (The Mole Document Classifier used to configure and process source document repositories, extract document properties and content for analysis, calculate classification value rankings and the move documents into target document repositories.)

Information and Knowledge Management Market