“The Role of Social Network Analysis” – Forrester Research Interviews Franz Inc.

Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz, Inc. was interviewed by James Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, as a subject matter expert on Social Network Analysis in the emerging Semantic Technologies field. James’ report, entitled “Zero in on CRM HEROes: The Role of Social Network Analysis,” reflects Franz Inc.’s recent work with Amdocs on the development of Amdocs’ AIDA platform (insert Bill’s Video Link). Amdocs’ effort to improve customer relationship management via intelligent decision automation is a key issue for telecom that Amdocs has identified. AllegroGraph is the key facilitator for this move to enhance customer relationship opportunities with Semantic Technologies.

“In today’s connected online world, customer-orientated business requires real-time contextual knowledge across all business channels and relevant social and competitive forces, said Bill Guinn, CTO of Amdocs Product Enabler Group. Semantic technologies such as Franz’s AllegroGraph database, can enable real-time, 24/7 customer insight that is both predictive and personalized for each customer. When used to power a decision engine in the transactional flow of business, cost reductions in customer care, leaps forward in customer satisfaction, and significant improvements in product uptake can result.”

AllegroGraph provides users an event-based view of their datasets. Events are broadly defined as things that have particular type (i.e. financial transactions, customer purchases, and meetings), a number of actors (payee, payer, patient, terrorist), a start time, an end time and a location. Customers can use AllegroGraph to reason about types of events; link events to companies and people through social networking algorithms; and link to events and places through a user-friendly layer of temporal reasoning rules. Event analysis is further enhanced with a geospatial engine that is as fast as specialized spatial databases.

AllegroGraph includes a Social Networking Algorithm library that treats a triple-store as a graph of relations, with functions for measuring importance and centrality as well as several families of search functions. Example algorithms are nodal-degree, nodal-neighbors, ego-group, graph-density, actor-degree-centrality, group-degree-centrality, actor-closeness-centrality, group-closeness-centrality, actor betweenness-centrality, group-betweenness-centrality, page-rank-centrality, and cliques. Geospatial and temporal primitives combined with SNA functions form an Activity Recognition framework for flexibly analyzing networks and events in large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

“Today’s leading companies have realized the incredible value locked up in their existing unstructured and structured data they are unable to exploit,” said Dr. Aasman. “This realization is driving demand for sophisticated analytics over diverse sources such as corporate email, documents, spreadsheets, customer support logs, and social networks and so on, not just from relational databases. But conducting queries across such heterogeneous data sources is impractical, if not infeasible, because of technologic limitation of traditional relational databases. With AllegroGraph, companies can easily transform and integrate unstructured and structured data and query it in real-time, providing critical intelligence for business to compete and excel.

Forrester customers can view the entire report available at Forrester.com