Predicting Consumer Behavior Drives Growth of Text Analytics

Retailers are getting hip to the latest fashion—using text analytics to predict what consumers are going to do and buy next.

According to a new report by Allied Market Research, predictive analytics in the retail sector will be responsible for nearly a third of growth of the overall text analytics market. That market could grow 25 percent a year annually through 2020, when it may account for $6.5 billion in spending by organizations, they say.

Predictive analytics will be big for years to come, in retail and elsewhere, the research group postulates. “Predictive analytics is the most attractive application within text analytics, which provides insights on unstructured text and helps the companies to formulate business strategies accordingly.”

Allied attributes the rise of text analytics to the rising acceptance of social media and the use of cloud storage. “The upsurge in the adoption of social networking platforms for conversations, rising adoption of cloud computing technologies, and the ability of text analytics to move beyond sentiment analysis are some major driving factors for text analytics industry,” the group says.

Text analytics is most popular in North America, which has a number of early adopters in the field and owns a 40 percent share of the global text analytics market. In addition to retailers, the healthcare field is also a big user of text analytics, the researcher say, as is the financial services industry.

About 2.5 exabytes of data was generated every day in North America in 2012, and the figure is doubling every 40 months, the researchers say (which means by the end of 2016, there will be about 5 exabytes generated every day on the continent). “[A] substantial amount of data is generated in the region on a daily basis, which is a gold mine for companies that understand the importance of historical data.”

Top players in the text analytics market include Attensity, Clarabridge, HP, IBM, Linguamatics, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Tableau, and TIBCO, Allied says in the report. On-premise deployments of text analytics are the norm now, but cloud deployments will drive the growth in the future, they say.

Source: Allied Market Research

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