“Today, CIOs and Business Decision-makers are seeking more flexible and investment-friendly models with ongoing access to a service.”
There’s so much buzz around Big Data – but how about Big Content? Surely, an up and coming area, getting sexier as usage cases expand. For example, you watch your sales drop in a certain region – it’s good that you’re tracking, but the next more important step is to understand why they dropped, and – even more importantly – what you are going to do about it.
This is where Big Content comes in, helping you understand patterns and connections between complaints and the sales drop. And this is just one example.
Crossing over to the vendor side, you have Big Content – how do you sell it? How do you monetize it? As is the case with many other software verticals, Big Content buyers want to try before they buy and want to pay with subscriptions to avoid high upfront costs.
We’ve spoken recently to Jeroen Kleinhoven, CEO of Treparel, to understand more about Big Content, its applications and some predictions for the future.
Avangate: So, Jeroen, tell us about Big Content and what it means for Treparel.
JK: To start, let me give you some quick background info: content (unstructured data) represents almost 80% of the data within an organization, so quite a big percentage. Still, with the help of Business Intelligence and Business Analytics tools, most companies are focusing on analyzing, reporting on and visualizing structured data (financial data), essentially tackling just 20% of the enterprise data and neglecting the remaining 80%.
However, usage cases are endless. For example, if you notice – using a BI tool – that your revenue has dropped in a particular region, then Content Analytics can show you how many client complaints were filed (call center data, comments on community reviews, etc.) and the overall nature of these complaints.
The convergence of the two specific technologies – BI and Big Content-, together with Enterprise Search, is, according to IDC, the ultimate decision support solution for an organization.
Also, in its July 2014 edition of the “Emerging Technologies’ Hype Cycle” Gartner predicts that mainstream adoption of Content Analytics is just 2 to 5 years away and mainstream adoption of Big Data is over 5 to 10 years away. Hopefully this tells you something about the importance of Big Content.
So at Treparel (Delft, The Netherlands), we offer a service called KMX Big Content Analytics and Visualization solutions for organizations in private and public sectors to gain faster, more reliable, and more precise insights into large complex enterprise content, websites, email, patents and research literature. Basically, on unstructured data.
Avangate: Application areas are endless, of course – any trendy examples? For instance, I saw a post on your blog on 3D printing – how does Big Content work for that?
JK: The blog post provided a sample analysis to reveal the patent landscape of 3D technologies and vendors. It demonstrated that Big Content is able to give answers to unasked questions; it visualizes a large set of content (patents in this example) which you can further explore. It’s a very commonly used application of our KMX Big Content product. You can do similar kinds of analysis with content like emails, blogs or information in a Content Management System.
Avangate: Who buys Big Content and have you noticed any changes in the way Big Content is bought?
JK: The buyers of our software are private and public organizations that, most often, provide Analytical use cases. For the Academic world, that analyze large volumes of data for decades, we have a special Big Content KMX package.
So who’s the actual buyer in these organizations? Usually, these are the Information Analysts or Data Scientists guys, but CIOs of larger organizations are starting to explore and invest in Big Content capabilities as well. The IP Dashboard solution, which we’ve jointly developed with a partner, is licensed directly by the business, in this case IP management of Fortune 500 companies.
What is interesting to note is that when the company was founded, in 2006, the industry was mostly about perpetual licenses with an annual fee for maintenance & support. Today, CIOs and Business Decision-makers are seeking more flexible and investment-friendly models with ongoing access to a service, rather than the purchase of a one-time product. So our Big Content package, KMX, can be purchased on a yearly subscription basis. We also offer free trials. We’ve found most companies prefer a supported proof-of-concept to get the fastest ROI of the software.
Since we started with a SaaS-type license, we also started to develop an indirect sales model through Value Added Resellers and an online webshop for Independent Consultants, SMBs and Academics, noticing an increased appetite for direct online purchases.
Avangate: Noticed that you focus on the developer community and API – how important is that aspect for your business and what role do developers play today?
JK: Developers are of growing importance to us. We cooperate with an evolving group of partners in Patent Services, Fraud Detection, eDiscovery and Forensics, most of them with text mining expertise. They are using our Big Content KMX software and our developer API to ignite their own vertical solutions with a modular-clustering, machine-learning based classification and visualization engine.
Most open source tools require substantial development, but our developer API guarantees a fast go-to-market of our clients’ solution. Both developers and partners can benefit from the years of research, development and client experiences in our KMX product.
Avangate: Please make a bold prediction for 2015 as far as Big Content is concerned.
JK: In 2015, I expect CIOs and Business Decision-makers to become much more aware about the unprecedented value they can gain when they tap into their numerous sources of enterprise content, igniting their Business Intelligence projects with Search and Text Analytics / Content Analytics use cases.
