IBM MOVING IN ON INTELLISEEK, UMBRIA, CYMFONY

Interesting move by IBM. They are definitely one of the larger players in IT that is riding the wave from the blogosphere. Their "Public Image Monitoring Solution" is a solution that competes with Intelliseek, Umbria, Cymfony, and few others that play within this space. This definitely puts some heat on the other players since IBM can leverage its established customer base and huge salesforce that sells its various software and hardware solutions.

IBM said it is developing an application to analyze how discussions on blogs and other Web sites are affecting a given corporation's image.

The computing giant on Monday described a service, called the Public Image Monitoring Solution, that searches through reams of blogs, news stories and other material to distill useful information for companies.

IBM is testing the application with its partners and the Morgan Stanley financial services firm. The new service would draw on IBM's text analytics and search software, WebSphere Information Integration OmniFind Edition.

IBM originally developed OmniFind to index and search information that resides within corporate networks. But it found that some customers were keen on learning what outsiders were saying on the Web about a given corporation, said Marc Andrews, IBM's director of strategy and business development for unstructured information.

"Organizations are struggling to understand what people are saying about them in public," said Andrews. "That ends up having an impact on opinion and buying decisions."

Andrews on Monday demonstrated a prototype where a marketing department of an automotive firm could search through blogs, news stories and newsgroups to gauge consumer feelings. (full article)