Company: Clarabridge, Inc., Reston, VA
Entered by: Interprose Public Relations
Company Description: Clarabridge enables Fortune 2000 and government customers to transform text into valuable information to improve market research, customer care, product development, quality assurance and risk management. Clarabridge's Content Mining Platform™ is the first text mining solution to work seamlessly with standard BI applications, tools and techniques.
Nomination Category: Team Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Product Development Team

Nomination Title: Clarabridge Product Development Team

1. Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved in the past year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Some of Clarabridge’s competitors had worked for more than 15 years in natural-
language processing (NLP), a critical underpinning technology of text mining
that is designed to help computers discern meaning from human language. In six
months of 2006, the Clarabridge Product Development Team engineered an NLP
technology optimized specifically for commercialized text mining.

With integrated entity extraction, fact extraction, categorization, sentiment extraction and other NLP capabilities, Clarabridge’s Content Mining Platform (CMP) became the industry’s first complete solution for enabling a company’s general business users—as opposed to Information Technology “power users”—to quickly, easily convert internal and external source data into useful business intelligence. The achievement of the Clarabridge Product Development Team is the result of maintaining a tight customer-centric focus.

“In traditional NLP, you strive to read literally every word of every sentence
to understand the exact meaning, identify each part of speech and find entities
and facts,” said Gene Sohn, vice president of engineering with
Clarabridge. “You measure the quality of the extraction process, and you judge
success on metrics such as recall (whether the system finds everything that
needs to be found) and precision (whether what is found is accurate).

“We took those metrics and turned them on their head. We observed that
principles of business intelligence and OLAP (online analytical processing)
could be applied to traditional text-mining methods and that the broader
trending and analysis available with Clarabridge's solution could provide
exceptional value for our customers—without being so critically dependent on
the raw quality of the textual-extraction process.”

The idea for Clarabridge’s CMP solution sprung from the company’s early work
with a government oversight agency that identifies fraudulent activity among
publicly traded companies. Clarabridge’s founders—veterans of the business-
intelligence space—recognized that unstructured data analysis would eventually
hold tremendous competitive value in the commercial space, with the
proliferation of second-generation Internet-based services such as social
networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies. By bringing this
business-intelligence orientation to bear in a field previously dominated by
linguistics expertise, Clarabridge forged a new market category: commercialized
text mining.

“We based a solution built on what we had learned that commercial customers
need through our experience in the business-intelligence world,” Sohn
says. “For our end-user application—commercialized text mining—the goal was to
find certain words and phrases and do things like map trends in mentions to
measure sentiment.”

Unstructured textual documents—Internet-based consumer-generated content, online product reviews, call-center transcripts, chat sessions, medical documents, insurance claims, e-mails, etc.—can be mined and analyzed alongside structured transactional data to enhance decision-making. Businesses can use the Clarabridge solution to more quickly and precisely detect customer needs, issues and opportunities—and ultimately better serve their own customers.

The proof of the Clarabridge Product Development Team’s success? The company
has experienced five consecutive quarters of revenue growth, and customers in
markets as diverse as consumer goods, retail, life sciences and financial
services have deployed Clarabridge’s solutions.

2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

http://www.clarabridge.com/news/20070122.php
http://www.clarabridge.com/news/20060123.php
http://www.clarabridge.com/news/20070222.php
http://www.marketingprofs.com/login/join.asp?adref=rdblk&source=/7/text-mining-
customer-intelligence-banerjee.asp
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1075369
http://www.clarabridge.com/resources/downloads.php

3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:

Gene Sohn, vice president of engineering, oversees Clarabridge's technical
architecture, engineering and delivery to customers, resellers and partners.
Prior to joining Clarabridge, Gene co-founded Viador, a pioneer in the
enterprise portal space. Gene was responsible for the entire development—from
conception to delivery—of the Viador E-Portal Server, used by more than 800
customers. Previously, he served as a software engineer at Oracle, leading the
development of the Oracle Reporting Server, which ultimately became the basis
for Oracle's Web reporting architecture. Gene holds a bachelor of science
degree in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.