Parabole search analytics product moves to Azure Marketplace

Parabole.ai has moved its Cognitive Analytics Platform onto Microsoft Azure Marketplace in an effort to provide clients with improved knowledge mining capabilities.

The Cognitive Analytics Platform enables users to build knowledge mining and search platforms for their customers and employees. According to Parabole, the move to Microsoft Azure gives users more scalability and features, including security, built-in indexing and storage capabilities.

The intention of the move is to enhance Parabole's training and classification models to train algorithms and tag documents based on custom categories defined by the user.

According to Darin Stewart, research vice president at Gartner, the move to a cloud service like Azure is a trend across tool and platform vendors. However, he added that the extent to which Parabole will use the capabilities of Azure Cognitive Skills is unique.

"They are basically combining generally available capability with their own proprietary capabilities to provide an aggregate service that would otherwise be challenging for an end-user organization to develop and deploy on their own," he said. "The emphasis on unsupervised learning in training custom models is atypical, especially in the context of classification."

Stewart also added that organizations already using Azure Search will have a smooth adoption process when it comes to adding a new capability. However, those that have only used on-premises search products will have a "significant learning curve and deployment effort."

Overall, he said this move lowers the threshold for organizations to use cognitive search and search-based analytics.

"This will enable Parabole to potentially compete with more established players in this space, such as Coveo and Attivio," Stewart said. "It also expands the potential market for Azure Search, which to this point has been focused on application development and website development. It should give them a foothold in the search-driven data science market, which is exploding at the moment."