22 Sept 2010
Expert System announced today that it has been named to IDC’s “Innovative Information Access Companies Under $100M to Watch” list. Expert System’s semantic software searches, discovers, classifies and interprets text information. IDC recognized Expert System for its COGITO Answers solution, a customer support system for mobile services that allows customers to ask questions in everyday language and receive instant, accurate information.
To identify the companies to watch, IDC solicited entries from information access vendors with annual revenues of less than $100 million who exemplified one or more of three key trends, listed below, in information access today. These trends are:
• Search-Based Applications: The emergence of a category of applications designed to solve a particular business problem or streamline a business process that has a strong need for information, usually from multiple sources. They create a polished integrated work environment for information workers for eDiscovery, sales, research, reputation monitoring, Voice of the customer, or customer support.
• Unified Access/Management to Content and Data: The emergence of new approaches to the content/data access problem, notably hybrid data structures that combine the advantages of speed and flexibility in search architectures with the data integrity of structured repositories.
• Collaborative Decision Management: The growth and adoption of analytic software tools and features that enable documentation of decision processes, provide contextual collaboration, and improve not only information sharing but the sharing of experience that supplemented the data to inform a decision.
“Large corporations are challenged today by the large amount of information they must digest from both external and internal sources,” said Sue Feldman, research vice president, search and discovery technologies at IDC. “We asked innovative small companies to submit their solutions to this growing problem. Expert System addressed a particularly difficult aspect: how to provide good answers on a mobile device. COGITO Answers melds technology, demand and design into a search-based application that saves its customer call center costs while filling an unmet need for users.”
Built on a mobile natural language interface, COGITO Answers is a semantic search platform that streamlines customer self-help options and eliminates excessive customer service needs and costs for companies. The software understands the request, and semantically searches, discovers and extracts information to deliver the best fit answer available in the premium knowledge base.
“With COGITO Answers, users can easily ask questions via the Internet, email or mobile device, and instantly receive accurate data to answer the request—ultimately improving customer service and streamlining a company’s customer service demands,” said Brooke Aker, CEO of Expert System, USA. “Being recognized by IDC as an innovator in information access further highlights the benefits of semantics, especially within mobile platforms.”
IDC’s “Innovative Companies Under $100M to Watch” reports are a qualitative evaluation of a set of vendors within a specific market — they are not a stack ranking nor do they represent an exhaustive evaluation of all companies in a segment or a comparative ranking of the companies in the report. Vendors submitted case studies that exemplified one of the trends used as the basis for the award. These case studies were evaluated individually and independently by related market analysts across several pre-determined criteria. The case studies submitted for review had to demonstrate that the technology was available, able to be implemented, and provided real-world benefits to the customer.
