Nov
17
Written by:
Justin Langseth
11/17/2009 5:23 PM
Today we announced the GA release of our 4.0 version. We’re excited about the new functionality in this release, but even more excited about the great collaboration with our customers and partners that occurred to bring it about. Almost every new feature in 4.0 was the result from a customer at some point saying “wouldn’t it be nice if I could do X...” Working with our customer steering committee of 10 of our largest and most vocal (in a good way) customers, we worked to decide which of these ideas would provide the biggest additional business value to the users of Clarabridge.
One of the highlights in this new version is the ability for authorized end-users of Clarabridge to directly upload their own data into their system straight through their web browser. What we found working with many of our large enterprise customers is that while the bulk of their verbatim came from their CRM and survey systems, that are typically directly connected to the Clarabridge server, they would often have users who would need to load ad-hoc files and other sources.
This new ad-hoc upload feature allows these users to directly upload and process their ad-hoc data sets without any IT or systems administration involvement. This happens directly in the same Clarabridge Navigator web interface that they are already using for categorization and sentiment tuning, where they can also view the resulting analytics. By allowing direct upload, we allow all the “long tail” of ad-hoc and one-off sources to be added to the system alongside the enterprise application sources.
We have also made significant improvements to our categorization development interface. These new features make it much easier for teams of people to collaboratively view and edit classification structures, test the models, and move them from the development to QA to production status. Also we have enhanced the in-Navigator analysis capability extensively, to allow users to directly run, view, and analyze the results of our three complementary types of classification (clustering auto-categorization, Boolean rule-based, and machine learning) in an extremely intuitive way.
Important back-end enhancements round out the new 4.0 version. Our linguistics team has continued to improve our NLP engine, particularly in the areas of advanced sentiment resolution, sentiment-object attribution, clause separation, ambiguity resolution, and processing performance. Data in foreign languages can now be intermixed with English-language data in projects, classification structures, and analyses.
We feel that the new front-end functionality, combined with the back-end enhancements, serve to further distance Clarabridge from our competition. Again, a lot of the credit goes to our customer and partner community. Through their support and advice, we’ve been able to continue and even accelerate our rate of innovation, but do it in a way that is laser-focused on enhancing the business value that our products provide to our customers. We’re currently starting the development of our 4.1 version, and the initial designs are very exciting. Keep the ideas coming… we’re listening.