Factiva to drop IBM's WebFountain

WebFountain, the IBM web analysis platform, has been dropped by Factiva as the technology for its Insight for Reputation service.

Factiva said it was too slow for effective reputation management. Factiva, a business information provider service formed by Dow Jones and Reuters, and IBM announced a technology partnership in September 2003 to develop Insight for Reputation, a text mining tool that analyses web content for market perception.

"The specific reason IBM was dropped is the timeliness of their content," said a Factiva spokesperson. "The rate of re-fresh was not even daily. With reputation management you need it to be timely, they had a lag."

Ryan Warren, manager of the office of the CEO, told IWR: "They weren't developing at the speed we wanted." According to Factiva, IBM and Factiva have agreed that there are "more appropriate technologies" for reputation management.

IBM refused to comment. Factiva said it was still working with it on a number of solutions, and confirmed that Insight for Reputation was still in the "R&D phase."