INSIGHT Content Analyst's Cerebrant Combines SaaS Discovery, Machine Learning, and Content to Perform Next-Generation Research David Schubmehl IDC OPINION Organizations are looking for better ways to perform research, given the explosion of information that is available via the Internet today. IDC estimates that the digital universe is growing 40% per year into the next decade, and by 2020, the digital universe the data we create and copy annually will reach 44ZB or 44 trillion gigabytes. A significant percentage of the digital universe is human-generated data in the form of patent filings, research papers, blog posts, and news articles as well as social media data such as Twitter, Facebook, reddit, and other social commentary forums. While aggregators such as LexisNexis, Thomson Scientific, PubMed, and Elsevier exist to help pull all of this information together, it is difficult to bridge the gap between traditional information retrieval tools and the synthesis of knowledge across information sources without the help of advanced analytics tools. Content Analyst Company LLC, a search technologies company specializing in latent semantic indexing (LSI) and with roots from Bell Research, SAIC, and the U.S. intelligence agencies, has been developing unstructured information analytics tools for over a decade. The company has been selling its tools to other software companies for inclusion in their products in the ediscovery, research and information access industries. In addition: With the growing popularity of cloud-based computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies, Content Analyst has decided to launch a new product aimed directly at the research community. Its Cerebrant product offering combines advanced search, categorization, and filtering technologies combined with third-party content such as medical research, news, and industry information to bring cost-effective research to a whole new level. Cerebrant also offers the ability to ingest proprietary content and combine that with third-party information. The combination of advanced technology, SaaS-based services, and value-added content is where a growing number of companies are beginning to offer solutions aimed directly at communities of researchers and knowledge workers. Organizations in the market looking out for a new or enhanced solution for their researchers may want to consider Cerebrant among other options available in the market. IN THIS INSIGHT This IDC Insight discusses the announcement and release of Content Analyst's new Cerebrant SaaS Discovery platform, combining cloud-based discovery and machine learning with third-party content sources as well as an organization's internal content to facilitate research and exploration. March 2015, IDC #255065
SITUATION OVERVIEW Content Analyst Company, developer of the CAAT machine learning text analytics engine, recently announced the general availability of Cerebrant a SaaS-based discovery platform designed to enable subject matter experts in any industry to gain insight into the growing collections of unstructured content. Cerebrant enables users to find the most relevant internal and external content and discover important, nonobvious relationships buried within massive collections of unstructured information. Cerebrant was designed to enable subject matter experts to create an online workbench with large collections of content from disparate sources and navigate and explore their content sets in a matter of hours. Users can identify and select disparate collections of public and premium unstructured content such as scientific research papers, industry reports, syndicated research, news, Wikipedia, and other internal and external repositories. Unlike alternative solutions, Cerebrant is not dependent upon Boolean search strings, exhaustive taxonomies, or word libraries since it leverages the power of the Content Analyst's proprietary LSIbased learning engine. Users simply take a selection of text ranging from a short phrase, sentence, paragraph to an entire document, and Cerebrant identifies and ranks the most conceptually related documents, articles, and terms across the selected content sets, ranging from tens of thousands to millions of text items. About Latent Semantic Indexing According to Wikipedia, latent semantic indexing is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a statistical technique to identify patterns in the relationships between terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text. LSI's statistical approach is based on the common sense principle that words that are used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. A key capability of LSI is its ability to extract the conceptual content of a body of text by establishing associations between those terms that occur in similar contexts without the necessity of a taxonomy or other process that relates words and terms of similar meaning. LSI is able to correlate semantically related terms that are latent in a collection of text using statistical methods, and it was first applied to text at Bellcore Labs in the late 1980s. The method uncovers the underlying latent semantic structure in the usage of words in a body of text without really understanding it, and it can be used to extract the meaning of the text in response to user queries, commonly referred to as concept searches. Search queries on an LSI-based index of documents will return results that are conceptually similar in meaning to the search criteria even if the results don't share a specific word or words with the search criteria. The result of applying LSI is that it becomes easier to locate information that is related to the query, even though the exact terms that are being searched for are not found in the document result set. Figure 1 shows the example of documents automatically clustered into groups based on similarity of topic using LSI. 2015 IDC #255065 2
FIGURE 1 Content Analyst's Cerebrant Clustering Source: Content Analyst, 2015 Content Analyst's Cerebrant Cerebrant brings the power of the Content Analyst's proven CAAT text analytics engine that's used to process billions of text items in the U.S. Intelligence Community and dozens of ediscovery software products. Cerebrant delivers the power, security, and time to benefits of cloud computing through a simple browser-based interface, requiring little or no IT support to implement and use across targeted large-scale content repositories. Cerebrant is being offered by Content Analyst as a software-as-a-service offering to end-user customers. This is Content Analyst's first foray into the end-user market; all of the previous products have been developer and OEM technologies that other software companies integrate into their products. The initial market focus for Cerebrant is on the pharma market, and the introductory pricing for pharma is $7,500 for up to 10 users. The pharma version includes access to certain pharma content repositories such as PubMed Central and a collection of FDA guidance and drafts as well as pharma industry news. The starting cost for a version of standard Cerebrant without pharma-specific 2015 IDC #255065 3
content is $5,000 per month for 10 users as introductory pricing with the ability to ingest up to 5GB of user content with the content offered by Content Analyst. Both the pharma and the standard versions will come with general new content and the entire contents of Wikipedia as information sources for analysis. There will be a falling price curve for customers with more users, and the standard product will be multitenant with named user log-ins. However, organizations can contract with Content Analyst to provide standalone versions if necessary. The product uses Amazon's AWS as the compute service, providing Content Analyst with excellent uptime and capacity capabilities. FUTURE OUTLOOK Many organizations are beginning to offer content-based research and analytics services, and Content Analyst's Cerebrant research service is an excellent example of this trend. Competitors to Cerebrant are IHS' Goldfire research product as well as Northern Light's SinglePoint research service. The combination of Cerebrant's capabilities using LSI and the inclusion of third-party content with an initial price point of approximately $500 per user per month makes Content Analyst a company to consider when looking at the variety of research products and services now available to organizations. While Content Analyst is a new contender in the market for end-user services, it has a long and distinguished history as a technology vendor dealing with large amounts of unstructured information and text-based data sets. Organizations that are seeking to expand their capabilities in research should consider Cerebrant as one of several options as they assess which product or products will meet the growing requirements for better research tools. 2015 IDC #255065 4
About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. Global Headquarters 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA 508.872.8200 Twitter: @IDC idc-insights-community.com www.idc.com 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 www.idc.com to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit www.idc.com/offices. Please contact the IDC Hotline at 800.343.4952, ext. 7988 (or +1.508.988.7988) 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 2015 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.