The Hindu Business Line : Content classification software a critical component to growing markets

Chennai June 10 IBM, which recently announced the launch of a self-learning content classification software, is bullish on the sales potential in India.

"We see a growing number of enterprises across a variety of industries in India needing to bring IT support for their business processes, which are highly dependent on unstructured data, such as forms," said Mr Ponani Gopalakrishnan, Director, IBM Discovery Solution and former Manager of IBM India Research Labs.

Speaking to Business Line on what the software does and why IBM sees it clicking in India, Mr Gopalakrishnan said: "This technology is ideal for IT enterprises as well as the growing volumes of call centre data, self-help for Web site problem resolution and other high growth market opportunities thriving in India."

The software automatically categorises large volumes of enterprise information, making it easier to locate, retrieved and used for business purposes. It has been designed to help organisations cost-effectively understand what content exists, whether it is important and how it should be handled.

"Any market that is facing the problem of growing amounts of unstructured content and the need to organise it in a more automated manner is well suited to the product and the problems that it solves," Mr Gopalakrishnan said.

He added that customers have already seen "rapid return on investments" on account of use of the classification software.

On how IBM identified the market need for such a software, he said that it was a combination of customers asking for it and research suggesting that something like this would fly in the market.

"Our enterprise content management (ECM) customers helped us identify the need as they started to bring more and more content under management and adopted ECM more broadly in their enterprise."

He added: "Concurrently, our research groups involved in classification found increasing requests for such technology from customers as they grappled with new regulatory requirements."

According to Mr Gopalakrishnan, the company's classification product has been in the market for over eight years.

"It was, and continues to be, used to understand long form requests to contact centres (like e-mail) and in turn take automatic action (like providing a response, routing the e-mail or prioritising it)."

When IBM acquired FileNet, the new combined team realised that this existing product would be valuable in the ECM space.

"We conducted due diligence and feasibility studies for incorporating the existing product into our ECM architecture and found a good fit."

Stating that the software was largely developed in worldwide locations other than India, he said that the solution sits well in IBM's Enterprise Content Management portfolio, "which is applicable to many market segments worldwide."

Though specific market projections are not yet available for the segment, Mr Gopalakrishnan believes content classification software should be a critical component to growing markets.