Attensity Corporation announced today that it is joining forces with two other text analytics/information management companies, Living e and Empolis, to form a new company called Attensity Group focused on creating business user applications on top of sophisticated data and semantic analytics technology. According to Michelle de Haaff, CMO, the new combined company has software deployed in more than 500 installations worldwide and is in 250 of the Fortune 1000 companies.

The combined company offerings include the following applications:

• Voice of the Customer/Market Intelligence: analysis of unstructured information from internal and external sources in order to understand customer sentiment, root cause and issues. This helps to answer questions such as: What are the top three complaints about my service? How do I stack up against the competition?
• E-service: creates portals for online service content and includes guided search and escalation paths for both end customers and service agents. This helps to answer questions such as: How do I change my password? What workarounds have helped other customers?
• Automated Response Management: allows timely and accurate responses to incoming communications. This helps companies to answer inbound customer inquiries leveraging the same knowledge base used for E-Service.
• Research and Discovery: provides advanced search and classification of internal and external data, enabling early detection of issues in corporate and legal processes. This helps to answer questions such as: What pending legislation could affect our launch? Is my patent unique?
• Intelligence Analysis: analyzes human intelligence and public intelligence for the purpose of identifying and preventing criminal activity. This helps to answer question such as: Who is the leader of this cell? How is money being moved?

Attensity Group will also provide custom applications. It will sell in the Americas under the banner: Attensity, An Attensity Group Company and in Europe under the banner: Empolis, An Attensity Group Company.

Does it make sense?
In a nutshell, the combination of these companies elevates Attensity Group out of niche application provider status to $40M to $50M mid-sized company. The combined company is backed by Aeris Holdings.

Is this a viable move? Attensity Group claims that companies want applications, not platforms that they don't know what to do with. I think that the move makes sense because companies do want specific, straight-forward solutions to their problems. Look at how popular the SaaS model has been for Voice of the Customer solutions that utilize text analytics. Also, the traction that Attensity has gotten with its VoC solutions. Additionally, small companies have a hard time making it as platform providers. Text Analytics platforms are best left to substantially larger companies such as IBM or EMC that offer text analytics in conjunction with platforms (or as part of it). These companies have built a sustainable ecosystem around their platforms.

It also doesn't hurt that Attensity Group has some solid legs to stand on.