The best AI-driven data science platform you’ve never heard of

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When O’Reilly’s Strata Data Conference opens at the Javits Center in New York City later this week, some of the software vendors who helped usher in the big data era won’t be there. Take Alpine Data Labs, ClearStory Data, Hortonworks, MapR, Platfora and others, all of which have been acquired by larger vendors.

But there’s one thriving data science and analytics platform whose origin looks very different than those — OpenText Magellan was born at enterprise information management software maker OpenText in 2017.

At two years of age, OpenText Magellan has already qualified as a “strong performer” in The Forrester Wave Notebook-Based Predictive Analytics And Machine Learning Solutions, Q3 2018 alongside Cloudera, Databricks, H2O.ai and ahead of Anaconda and Google. (Oracle with its Data Science.com buy and Domino Data Lab are leaders.)

Forrester analysts Kjell Carlsson, Ph.D., Mike Gualtieri and others described Magellan this way:

“It tackles the gnarliest, most underleveraged valuable data…“(OpenText Magellan’s use of Jupyter) is the workbench interface many data science teams expect, and OpenText adds value by also giving them access to unstructured data with sophisticated text analytics,” they wrote.

And that’s an important differentiator, according to Zachary Scott Jarvinen the product marketing lead for AI at OpenText. After all, there’s a wealth of information stored in documents like company reports, contracts, email, marketing material, whitepapers, resumes, forms filled out during employee recruitment and onboarding, text messages, messaging on social networks, in surveys, and so on. Most enterprises aren’t leveraging it fully to gain critical insights.

That’s partly because the sheer volume of unstructured content is massive, and also because the velocity at which it is being created is huge — think about, how much textual information do you create everyday (think about everything you write down, every conversation that is heard, recorded or archived involving a machine, and video. OpenText Magellan helps enterprises leverage it all through Artificial Intelligence and machine learning algorithms in big data platforms. It transforms big data and big content into self-service data visualizations for users across organizations to increase automation, operational efficiencies and maximize revenue. And it does all of this in a way that is governed and compliant.

“We’re pretty good at this, we’ve been working with content for quite a while,” says Jarvinen, alluding to the fact that OpenText has been helping organizations manage content since 1991. Not only that, but OpenText took on text mining in 2006, which was noted as a bit of a breakthrough by the likes of O’Reilly Media’s Tim O’Reilly.

And that was at a time that some people still thought of AI as something out science fiction, like ET, and big data crunching technologies were too expensive and too hard to use for those who weren’t resource-rich computer scientists.

Fast forward to the present day, the use of open source Apache Spark — a unified analytics engine for big data processing, with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing — and its machine learning library MLlib are commonplace. OpenText has combined those with technologies it obtained through the acquisition of Actuate (which leverages open source Eclipse BIRT) and Nstein

Magellan brings something new(er) to the table for data scientists, business analysts and decision makers- AI and analytics capabilities on unstructured data.

The advantage that OpenText Magellan provides to its customers is the ability to operationalize models in business-friendly interfaces in a vast portfolio of enterprise information applications and services, including customer experience management, business network, digital process automation, and content management, according to the Forrester analysts.

If OpenText Magellan has a big problem, it’s that not enough data workers know it exists, a fact that’s illustrated in the almost non-existent circle in the Forrester Wave graphic above. Jarvinen aims to change that. He will be hosting a 10-minute pop-up talk, How to get value from the 80% of data you’re not using and make it easier to get started with Enterprise AI on the Expo floor at Strata on Wednesday. It might be worth checking out.

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