Most enterprises have business intelligence initiatives in place, often complemented by predictive analytics, but those applications rarely take advantage of unstructured business content. Instead, analyses of information-rich document, e-mail, social, online, and other text sources are handled via siloed applications, at a departmental level, without any link to the operational data that fuels BI and predictive analytics.

Text analytics automates the extraction of business value from Web sites and social media content, capturing information in readable form. This paper discusses text analytics and how it forms one part of a larger analytics solution aimed at complete customer and business awareness.