Infonic and Lexalytics have announced the merger of their text analytics businesses (press release, PDF) to create Lexalytics Limited. While not as well known as the usual suspects in social media analysis, these companies are growing behind the scenes, supplying the technology for automated sentiment analysis and more.
From the press release, Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones Insight use Infonic for sentiment analysis; ScoutLabs, Cisco, Smartbrief and BurrellesLuce use Lexalytics software. Other back-end technology deals are in the works. Based on a recent conversation with Lexalytics for their entry in the Guide to Social Media Analysis, they're also developing custom monitoring and analysis platforms for service providers (though not necessarily the ones listed above).
The technology behind the curtain
Lexalytics is focused on licensing their core text analytics technologies to software developers and building social media analysis platforms for vendors. The software licensing model will make text analytics—automated sentiment analysis, for example—available in a wider range of tools by lowering the barrier to entry for their developers. The custom software development model, meanwhile, will help service providers without a strong software development capability to match the features of platforms from more technology-focused companies.
For clients, this means more and better tools will be available. For vendors, it suggests some questions about technology strategy, which I'll open up in another post.
Just a bit more about the merger for anyone that's interested.
We're putting the businesses together because the technologies are very complimentary. We'll end up using some of the Infonic technology in the Salience 4.0 release due out this fall. The combined company will have very mature technology, which we will leverage to make a wider push at the market.