MIIAtech Private Vendor Watchlist Profile: Understanding the Person in the Data

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1 VENDOR PROFILE MIIAtech Private Vendor Watchlist Profile: Understanding the Person in the Data Susan Feldman IDC OPINION Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F MIIAtech NV ( is a next-generation search and analytics software company created in April 2008 to take advantage of emerging opportunities in the marketplace. MIIAtech developed an advanced multilingual natural language processing platform, called Tautona, which understands the meaning of what is being searched for and delivers information from multilingual sources that accurately reflects a user's need. While other semantic analysis platforms exist, Tautona addresses two aspects that differentiate it: it understands information in multiple languages, which is key for global enterprises, and it delivers very accurate information. Because information overload is an increasing problem for information workers, accurate information access is a critical need. The Tautona platform helps companies save time and money by helping them to find the precise information they need from large, complex enterprise databases. MIIAtech's semantic cross-lingual search and dialogue technology will automatically understand structured and unstructured (text) data in a simplified way. This last facet is significant: IDC believes that unifying access to information has become a market driver and a disrupter for both the search and the BI market. MIIAtech's technology should therefore be in great demand. We believe MIIAtech is a company to watch because: NLP to SQL technology makes MIIAtech a natural partner or an acquisition target for ERP and other transactional and database software vendors that want to improve user interaction to broaden use. Cross-language technology enables users to search in one language and retrieve in multiple languages. MIIAtech's deep linguistics delivers more accurate information and helps eliminate information overload. It is useful for mobile applications as well. Question answering and master data management will become required applications that can be built on a solid semantically-based platform. Additional search-based applications can be built on MIIAtech's platform. This is a fast-growing area today. Filing Information: November 2011, IDC #231048, Volume: 1 Private Vendor Watch Service: Vendor Profile

2 IN THIS VENDOR PROFILE This IDC Vendor Profile analyzes MIIAtech, a company playing in the search and discovery market, and reviews key success factors: market potential, technology/solution, corporate strategy, force multipliers, and customers. Leveraging IDC's expert understanding of the competitive landscape and future outlook, this document highlights company and market information tailored to the investment professional's needs. SITUATION OVERVIEW Company Overview MIIAtech, based in Brussels, Belgium, plays in the search and discovery market. The company will be particularly valuable in providing the text analytics necessary for the emerging information access and management market that will replace search and BI with a converged platform. Company details are provided in Table 1. TABLE 1 MIIAt ech Company Snapshot Category Industry Functional and secondary markets Details Content management and semantic search software HR, CRM, content management, call centers, telecom mobile content, intelligence services, online sales and auction Founding year 2008, relaunched 2011 Number of employees 15+ Number of customers Company location Web site Funding initiatives Investors Sales channels Revenue estimate 10 in beta test Brussels, Belgium Equity, debentures, loans from shareholders Private investors B2B $1 million to $10 million Source: IDC, # IDC

3 IDC Watch Factor Scores IDC Watch Factor scores measure private companies based on a set of five defined success factors. Each of the five key success factors is made up of detailed subquestions, which are assigned a value from 1 (weak) to 4 (strong). The average of the subcategories is then applied as the overall score for each category: Market potential: Market growth potential, strength of competition, and current stage of market (early adopters versus late majority) Technology/solution: Level of differentiation, disruptive capability, and scalability Corporate strategy: Go-to-market strategy, management pedigree, and financial status (running on venture capital with insignificant revenue versus selfsustaining and not seeking additional rounds of funding) Force multipliers: Current partnerships/certifications, additional partnerships likely within the next two years, and channel/sales strategy Customers: Number of existing customers, quality of existing customer base, geographic reach, and size of addressable market in the coming years, given the vendor's current capabilities Figure 1 shows the Watch Factor scores for MIIAtech versus the Watch Factor average scores for all companies ranked by the Private Vendor Watch Service in the applicable market at the time of publication. The sections that follow detail the reasons for those scores IDC #

4 FIGURE 1 MIIAt ech Watch Factor Score Versus Watch Factor Average Score Notes: The Watch Factor average score reflects the average score for all private companies scored by the Private Vendor Watch Service at the time of publication. Scores are based on a scale of 1 4, where 1 = weak and 4 = strong. Source: IDC, 2011 Market Potential Market MIIAtech's software plays in a hot software market for two purposes: As a smart CRM/HR application to make recruiters and customer relation professionals more productive As a key component for unifying access to both structured and unstructured information The enterprise of the future will be information centered, and will require agile, adaptable technology to monitor and mine information as it flows into the company. The new information platform must unite access to all data sources structured and unstructured. It must enable easy, natural interaction and be accessible to business users across the organization. It must normalize across all sources and formats to uncover the relationships that surface when you can, for instance, unite a customer's s with his/her blog postings, his/her calls to the call center, and his/her customer records. The market for technologies that can accomplish these tasks is growing rapidly, and a spate of recent acquisitions attests to the drive by large software vendors to add such technologies quickly to their software stacks. 4 # IDC

5 IDC's recent survey of customers shows that their top reasons to invest in such technologies are that these technologies: Lower the cost of managing and analyzing information Unify access to all of clients' information sources both structured and unstructured (and provide a comprehensive view of clients' information across , file servers, applications) Provide more users faster, easier access to structured data in the clients' legacy systems Improve customer support All of these reasons rest on the assumption that software can understand human language in order to process vast amounts of text, map across information silos to find related data, and interact naturally with the average business user. Text analytics technology is required for each of these functions. The pure-play search and discovery market in 2010 was valued at $2.3 billion in software and maintenance revenue. This number excludes services revenue. It grew at 7% in There are two caveats to those numbers. The first is that we saw double-digit growth in the search-based applications and the text analytics sector of the market: over 17%. This represents one-third of the whole market, and it offsets the more anemic growth of roughly 5% in the enterprise search market. The second point is that the market for search tools like MIIAtech's extends well beyond the pureplay search and discovery market into CRM, call centers, content management, socialytics, business intelligence any application that requires language understanding of text. Therefore, the opportunity is larger than that represented by this market alone. MIIAtech has hit two market sweet spots. The first is search-based applications. These applications are built on the agile search backbone, rather than the more traditional database backbone. Oracle's acquisition of InQuira and Endeca, SAP's acquisition of Inxight, SAS' acquisition of Teragram, or HP's acquisition of Autonomy were all aimed at acquiring this necessary technology in order to expand information access beyond the database. The second sweet spot is text analytics. Text analytics extracts facts and relationships from text so that it can be treated like another data source for large enterprise information access and management applications. Today, the market for text analytics technology is growing quickly, as database vendors try to build the information access and management platforms that will supplant BI and search in the next decade. MIIAtech quickly found that vertical applications built on its technology were easier to market, and it selected recruitment and CRM as its first target verticals. These two verticals are well chosen because they both need streamlining: they require understanding of nonstandard text in such large volumes that it's impossible to sort through the information manually. Users of the software can therefore demonstrate ROI quickly. Vendors in the CRM space typically are hobbled by their database 2011 IDC #

6 technologies that are neither agile nor intuitive. The HR space has one large vendor, Monster, that has acquired text analytics technology, but its software would complement the deep parsing provided by MIIAtech. IDC estimates revenue for MIIAtech to be $1 million to $10 million. Note that the company, with its vertical products, was relaunched in 2011 so that its first-year revenue expectations are not a good predictor of following years. The management is highly experienced in the software industry, especially in text analytics, and appears well suited to promoting the new software applications. Given the market, and the depth of the technology, IDC expects rapid growth of over 10% in the next five years, with a distinct possibility of acquisition during that time. Market Disruption Text analytics applications and unified access platforms are already disrupting the marketplace. MIIAtech will join a small group of vendors that are "hot" right now. Competitive Landscape Monster is the HR front runner, and has just launched a new suite of products that are attractive to HR professionals and recruiters. Monster bought Trovix, an NLP engine, a number of years ago. Monster's depth of parsing is not as great as MIIAtech's, but it is improving. CareerBuilder also has limited NLP capabilities. In CRM, Oracle, SAP, Amdocs, and salesforce.com are front runners, but they need to embed technology like MIIAtech's for improving interaction. Coveo is aiming at the call center market, which is adjacent to HR. The company does not have deep semantic understanding, but can extract entities and categorize. Coveo has good speech-to-text capabilities and has patented them. In text analytics platforms, small companies like Attensity, Clarabridge, Temis, or Lexalytics have all carved out either OEM channels or verticals, none in HR and CRM. Of these, only Lexalytics markets itself as an embeddable platform. All of these small vendors are growing quickly, but are all in the $20 million range of revenue, at most. IBM uses its significant text analytics technologies in its services engagements, and has embedded them in Lotus Connections, and in Cognos. The market is just emerging, and we believe there is plenty of room for a solid text analytics company to gain market share, channels, and partners, especially if it targets verticals that require deep linguistic analysis. M&A MIIAtech could be an attractive target for Oracle, IBM, EMC, and Microsoft, which may all be interested in this type of technology. Given Oracle's acquisitive mode, and Oracle's strength in CRM, one might look to Oracle first. Lexalytics, Basis, and Attensity are all possible M&A targets as well. 6 # IDC

7 Table 2 displays recent M&A deals in the search and discovery market. TABLE 2 Search and Discovery M&A Deals, Year Acquirer Target Deal Amount Technology 2011 Oracle Endeca Undisclosed Search, unified access, CRM 2011 Apple SIRI US$250M Mobile content search 2011 HP Autonomy US$11B Content management 2011 Oracle InQuira Undisclosed CRM/question answering 2011 Autonomy Iron Mountain Digital US$380M ediscovery, archiving 2011 IBM i2 Undisclosed Intelligence analytics 2010 Google Aardvark US$60M Enhanced search 2010 Dassault Systemes Exalead 135M euros Search and semantic analysis 2010 Attensity Biz360 Undisclosed Listening platform/semantic analysis 2010 OpenText NStein US$34M Semantic analysis 2010 EMC Greenplum US$300M+ Analytics, big data 2009 IBM SPSS US$1.2B Predictive and text analytics, modeling 2009 Autonomy Interwoven US$775M Web content management 2008 Microsoft Powerset US$100M Web search text analytics 2008 SAS Teragram Undisclosed Language analyzers, semantic analysis 2008 Monster Trovix US$72.5M HR resume mining with text analytics 2008 Iron Mountain Stratify US$158M ediscovery 2008 Microsoft FAST US$1.2B Search 2008 SDL Tridion, Idiom, Trados US$60M CM and translation 2008 IBM Cognos US$5B BI/content analytics 2007 SAP Inxight US$76M ERP 2007 Reuters ClearForest Undisclosed Semantic analysis 2006 IBM LAS, SRD Undisclosed Name recognition 2011 IDC #

8 TABLE 2 Search and Discovery M&A Deals, Year Acquirer Target Deal Amount Technology 2006 IBM FileNet US$1.6B Content management 2005 Progress Software EasyAsk US$9.2M Semantic analytics for commerce 2005 Autonomy Verity US$500M Search 2005 IBM iphrase Undisclosed Content+data search 2004 iphrase Banter Undisclosed CRM 2003 Consona-knova-Kanisa Ask Jeeves Enterprise US$4.25M Question answering, analytics 2003 EMC Documentum US$1.7B Content management, content analytics 2000 SPSS Lexiquest Undisclosed Text analytics Source: IDC, 2011 Technology/Solution Tautona HR Tautona HR searches and analyzes CV/job-order content databases and returns highly relevant matches, whether the actual query terms match exactly or not. Because it is semantically based, Tautona will return synonyms and concept matches as well as key words. Tautona HR is available as on-premise software, or as either a cloud or a SAAS solution. The business model for Tautona HR is direct sales, and also via reseller/partners. MIIAtech charges an annual usage fee based on the number of users and the number of resumes or job orders processed. Target customers are Fortune 500 companies, government organizations, HR outplacement companies, headhunter companies, online recruitment companies. HR managers need to use multiple information sources in varied formats: the company HR database, online databases, or social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Without semantic matching technology, such a query and match exercise may take several hours of opening one database after the other, and hours of browsing through the results. Keyword matching eliminates good candidates who did not use the same terms as the query, but it also returns far too many false drops and poor matches. This becomes a productivity nightmare for HR professionals. Tautona HR analyzes both search queries and "content" using the same semantic engine. It matches not just key words but concepts based on word meanings, grammatical and syntax analysis, and semantic pattern detection. This deep analysis returns more accurate results, no matter 8 # IDC

9 whether the query terms are in the resume or not. Users can phrase their search questions in natural language. One key differentiator is the cross-language capabilities of Tautona HR: Questions asked in English can be matched to relevant answers in a Chinese database (and subsequently translated to English), or the other way around. The system also accommodates complex queries such as "worked in companies under U.S. tax regulations, fluent in English, French and a good understanding of Spanish, with an MBA degree in applied economics, with a minimum of 10 years relevant experience, and willing to travel up to 50% of his working time." Platforms supported include any PC or server hardware running Windows OS, server OS, Java, or Web cloud. Other Products/Solutions Offered by MIIAtech Tautona CRM provides better access to existing CRM applications. Based on the same technology as Tautona HR, Tautona CRM returns more accurate results of CRM applications, particularly those that are databases. The precise nature of the answers returned by this application makes it a nice candidate for mobile use for sales and marketing professionals. MIIAtech charges an annual usage fee for each end user. MIIAtech will install Tautona CRM as a solution on top of existing CRM applications. MIIAtech's business model for this product is to use resellers, partners, and integrators including suppliers of existing CRM solution and via the CM developers/partners of these suppliers. Because it is a text analytics and search platform, MIIAtech also has the potential to play in master data management and content analytics applications. MIIAtech could also develop a question-answering application that would suit its CRM focus nicely. MIIAtech has planned and has started the development of additional NLP and semantic search and matching solutions for the following markets: opinion and sensitivity mining (of blogs, chat, social Web sites, internal s, intelligence services content), assistance to call centers, online sales and auctioning Web sites, and telecom companies offering better mobile content search solutions. MIIAtech is also developing a software development kit (SDK), allowing various development companies that offer solutions to aforementioned markets to use this MIIAtech SDK and make their own customized solutions in a revenuesharing model with MIIAtech. MIIAtech is also developing additional language versions (in addition to the current English/Chinese/French/Dutch versions). The human and funding resources for these additional developments have been budgeted for; however, no revenues from these additional solutions have been forecast yet IDC #

10 Corporate Strategy Leadership While MIIAtech is a new company, its principals have a wealth of experience in the software industry. Stephen Lernout, Chairman and CEO. Managing director at MIIA Holding Ltd.; VP, sales and marketing, at MiaMia Europe and USA; lecturer in marketing in the F&B "Internet industry"; founder and director at Fibrespaces.com; and founder and director at Fibreclub.com Jan Van Sas, CTO. Lecturer in English and applied computer science at Karel de Grote Hogeschool, owner and consultant at The LingWareHouse VOF (selfemployed), R&D manager at Vantage, R&D manager at Sail-Labs, R&D manager at Lernout & Hauspie, senior R&D manager at Novell, project and team leader at WordPerfect, and computational linguist at Soft-Art Frank Aernout, VP Marketing and Communications. New business/marketing and sales at KYSOH SA, new biz and marketing at Family Service International, marketing director (for the Netherlands and Switzerland) at PepsiCo, managing director at BMG Entertainment, and brand manager at Procter & Gamble Note: MIIAtech's technical staff (R&D, product development, and customer support) consist of computational linguists who have been active for more than 150 years (combined) in this software specialization. There has been no turnover in the management team. Go-to-Market Strategy MIIAtech's products are available on-premise, as SaaS or a cloud offering. MIIAtech will pursue, rightly, a multifaceted approach to marketing and sales: Direct sales for Tautona HR to HR departments in large organizations, recruiters, online HR job boards, and so forth Channel sales through resellers and partners of Tautona CRM to help end users improve search and exploration of multiple CRM information sources MIIAtech's sales and marketing team will concentrate on developing compelling collateral, speaking at trade shows, publishing in trade publications as they build out their staff and customer list. Exit Strategy MIIAtech's preferred exit strategy is to be acquired by a larger software company (EMC, IBM, OpenText, Google, Apple, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, etc.) in order to have much faster a very large potential customer base for its solutions and to satisfy the objectives of the shareholders, who invested primarily for the potential ROI, via such an exit strategy. 10 # IDC

11 IDC believes that this is the right exit strategy because MIIAtech is a technology company in a hot area that has garnered much interest recently from large companies. I believe that Oracle would be a prime acquirer, but that MIIAtech should also look at a variety of large technology vendors in mobile/telecommunications, content management, ERP and transactional applications, and ecommerce. Key Acquisitions MIIAtech has not made any acquisitions. Current Investors Table 3 displays a detailed funding history for MIIAtech. TABLE 3 MIIAt ech Detailed Funding History Round Date Amount Investors A Apr Mar ,000 euros Twelve private investors B Dec Nov ,000 euros Issued debentures/private investors C Dec May ,797,141 euros Shareholder loans D May 2011 current 500,000 euros (part of 3,500,000 euros equity issuing for 30% of total shares) Five private investors Source: IDC, 2011 Force Multipliers Partners SugarCRM ADMB Partnership Opportunities MIIAtech has signed a codeveloper and comarketing agreement with SugarCRM and with ADMB. Talks for strategic partnerships have started with OpenText, and additional interest has been expressed by IBM and Microsoft Dynamics, with planned in-depth talks in 4Q11. Partnership opportunities may also arise at CareerBuilder, or with systems integrators that need an in-depth semantic platform IDC #

12 Channel/Sales Strategy MIIAtech expects reseller and other forms of strategic partnerships with a few large companies in the course of 2012, with more such partnerships expected in In addition, by mid-2012, the aforementioned SDK will be ready and launched, allowing MIIAtech to expand its reach to many more "end users" via shared revenue (30 70%) with many developers that make customized semantic analysis and search solutions for their end users. Customers Key Customers Note that the CRM and HR products have only been on the market a few months, although the platform has been in development since MIIAtech is in negotiations with 15 large prospective customers concerning the use of Tautona HR and/or CRM on a recurrent basis, and according to the aforementioned pricing model. A number of beta tests have been conducted with these target customers. Key Audiences CRM and HR verticals are very promising. They are a good starting place for MIIAtech to cross the chasm. Large organizations' HR/recruitment departments would be a good target for onpremise and SaaS offerings. Eventually the cloud offering could be lucrative; Monster's fees are very high for small recruiters, and there's a good opportunity to expand into this area with a lower-cost/high-volume offering. Geographic Reach Currently: Europe (via MIIAtech's main office in Brussels, Belgium), the United States (through MIIAtech's main office in Belgium, but in cooperation with 151 Ventures, New York, Feintuch, New York, and Laconia, Reston, Virginia), and China (via MIIAtech's own office in Beijing) Planned: Expanding the existing offices, opening a full-support office at both West Coast and East Coast of the United States, and expanding in Europe, Asia, and South America via reseller partners FUT URE OUTLOOK Challenges and Opportunities Challenges For any small technology company, marketing and buzz creation are the main challenges. The current small size of the sales and marketing team of MIIAtech, along with the fact that MIIAtech is not known at the level of decision making among most of 12 # IDC

13 MIIAtech's targeted customers, can cause slow growth of MIIAtech's customer base, giving time to MIIAtech's customers to catch up with the unique technology of Tautona HR and CRM. Opportunities Because of the depth of its semantic technology, and the fact that the platform includes both search and text analytics, MIIAtech could gain a nice niche by OEMing its technology or partnering with software integrators, particularly those software integrators that specialize in CRM. They could also become the embedded engine for improving existing job boards. It's always easier to sell fine technology to another technology-savvy organization because of the high level of tech understanding that is needed. If MIIAtech can create buzz through social media, and has an inexpensive offering, it might use its cloud to garner business that Monster doesn't address, making up in volume for its lower fees. Mobile apps, particularly mobile search, need accurate results. This technology could be critical to mobile vendors in differentiating their services. MIIAtech's opportunities lie in decision support systems that require inferencing as well as semantics a hot area in the not too distant future, given the buzz surrounding IBM's Watson. Call center applications and question answering in general are another opportunity. Note that Oracle's acquisition of InQuira will fuel interest in similar technologies. ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE Reason to Watch MIIAtech appears to have developed in-depth and broad capabilities for language understanding. In the next 10 years, this will become the key differentiator for a new wave of software development to create highly interactive conversational systems that can carry on a humanlike dialogue with users. A second compelling point of interest is MIIAtech's ability to unite data and content in unified access systems. Large vendors are now assembling the software stack to compete in this area. We believe that over the next five years, both the BI and the search market will be supplanted by single information access systems. Linguistic technology is necessary at the bottom of the stack to normalize and tag (master data management) all the data and content sources. At the top of the stack, query management of the repositories also relies on deep semantic understanding, as does the interaction with the user. Therefore, the MIIAtech technology should be very appealing to large vendors IDC #

14 In the interim, MIIAtech's vertical strategy seems sound. It should build its revenue, test its platform, and give prospective customers success stories to gain market share and attention. Differentiators Cross-language retrieval Sophisticated semantic analysis and search technology (The combination of a conceptua interlingua, semantic network and frames, ontologies, synsets, and relationships make this more than a one-trick pony. What we see increasingly in the market is that it takes a variety of technologies to understand queries and information, match them, and return highly relevant answers.) NLP to SQL technology Advanced semantic analysis, search, and relevant matching solution for HR and CRM Solution immediately deployable at a low recurrent usage fee, yet high gross margins for and EBIT percentage for MIIAtech Beta tested with large customers "On the radar" as a partner or an acquisition partner of some very large companies I.P. 100% owned Knowledgeable management and staff with many years of experience in this area LEARN MORE Related Research Trends in Search and Discovery, 2011 (IDC #230525, October, 2011) Search and Discovery Software: A Survey of Buying Intentions and Use (IDC #229149, July 2011) Worldwide Search and Discovery Software Forecast (IDC #228941, July 2011) Worldwide Search and Discovery 2010 Vendor Shares (IDC #228628, June 2011) Unified Access to Information: Less Seeking, More Finding (IDC #227780, April 2011) 14 # IDC

15 Copyright Notice This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit Please contact the IDC Hotline at , ext (or ) or sales@idc.com for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or Web rights. Copyright 2011 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved IDC #