What do text processing for call centers, predictive maintenance for field service technicians, and cybersecurity analytics all have in common? The answer: they are all applications of Palo Alto-based startup Maana’s new data mining platform.
The rather well-worn term data mining, however, doesn’t do justice to the semantically sophisticated, end-to-end technology that Maana has brought to market. Perhaps next-generation data mining is more apropos.
At the center of this week’s announcement is Maana’s new patent on its semantic search technology – although ‘search’ also undersells the power of what Maana has been able to accomplish.
In fact, Maana is running into the same problem that many semantic technology vendors have struggled with: explaining its value proposition so that its target buyers will not only understand what the technology does, but realize they need it.
In Maana’s case, it’s worth dissecting its story to uncover the true value. Let’s dive in and see if we can make sense of this disruptive, yet abstruse technology.
‘Upleveling’ Data Mining
Maana bills its product as an “analytics platform that operationalizes big data insights into line‐of‐business applications.” The operationalization part of this story means that the platform is able to take the results of its big data analysis and bring them to users. From there, line-of-business applications, from call center to petroleum well management apps, can display such insights within the application.
Maana’s secret sauce, however, lies in its patented semantic algorithms. The platform provides an “emergent semantic graph, where the structure reflects the original data,” explains Donald Thompson, cofounder and CTO of Maana. “The platform then enriches and ‘uplevels’ the data.”
This notion of upleveling is core to the Maana value proposition. Traditional data mining tools are generally for data scientists to work with. In contrast, Maana refocuses data mining on end-user self-service within line of business applications people already use. “Maana enables better human interaction with data,” according to Thompson.
Data mining is an established data processing term that refers to extracting new value out of existing data that wasn’t obvious from the original data. What Maana brings to the data mining story is its ability to leverage semantic graph technology to deliver a more holistic approach that targets – and then surpasses – the goals of traditional data mining.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/12/17/maana-reinvents-data-mining-for-the-digital-age/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Kenneth Jensen (CC BY-SA 3.0).
