At the heart of the FactSpotter software is a linguistic engine that analyses words and the construction of phrases and sentences in unstructured data i.e. text files, to which Xerox is adding a deliberately simple user interface, for non-experts to carry out searches in natural language.
Frederique Segond, area manager for parsing and semantics at the Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE), said the idea for productizing the technology is for XGS to host the engine and offer it as a service, with different modules. We have modules for morphological analysis, syntactical tagging, tokenising, disambiguation and a variety of other features, and different customers will require different levels of content discovery, she said.
The first iteration of this productization will be as an e-discovery service offered by Xerox Litigation Services (XLS), a division the Stamford, Connecticut-based group beefed up in June last year with the acquisition of e-discovery service provider Amici LLC. The expectation is that XLS will start to offer services underpinned by FactSpotter some time over the next 18 months.
However, said Segond, there are clearly other types of application for the technology beyond litigation support (mainly a US play at this point) and compliance. She cited risk management in the banking, health and homeland security sectors, as well as support for CRM activity with deeper analysis. These too are services that could be delivered by other parts of XGS.
Jean-Rene Gain, director and general manager of marketing for strategy and alliances at XGS in Europe, said that, at least in terms of the e-discovery capability, pricing could be on a per-page, per-document or per-transaction basis, though Patrick Mazeau, manager of customer-led innovation at XRCE, added that you could also envisage a SOA-like approach where customers could pay per query, with perhaps a fee for so many thousand queries a month, for instance.
As for the competition for FactSpotter, clearly there are a number of players in the e-discovery space, including the likes of Zantaz and Symantec. Segond cited as other companies developing technology for semantic or conceptual search the likes of Autonomy, LexisNexis, Inxight and Temis, the last two interestingly working with other technologies licensed from Xerox.
Gain said that one of the main differences between what Xerox will offer in e-discovery and what some of the other players are doing is that they’re coming at it from the IT or infrastructure side, or sometimes from the content layer, but for us it’s a value add in our broader outsourcing proposition for virtual document processing. E-discovery is an element, but our objective is to deliver an end-to-end service for processing documents, both physical and virtual.
Our View
The FactSpotter technology fits into Xerox’s overall strategy of positioning itself as a service provider for a customer’s document processing, from scanning and OCRing physical documents through categorizing them, conversion into XML for content management and on into search, be it for e-discovery or any of the other apps Segond mentioned.
Moving beyond document outsourcing to what Gain referred to as document process outsourcing, a logical next step would be on into business process outsourcing, at which point Xerox would face a build, buy or partner choice.
