Katey and I are doing a few webinars at the moment and I’m also speaking at a conference this week, so I just wanted to round them all up here:

One webinar is already in the bag, which Katey did with Digital Reef & legal service provider Precise-Law, entitled ‘The challenges of a  reactive vs. proactive EDRM in the Enterprise.’ A replay is available here.

I’m speaking at Search Solutions 2010 this week  on Oct 21. It’s a one-day event organized by the British Computer Society, which I attended last year as a non-speaker and it was very good, so I hope to be able to contribute to maintaining that high standard! I’m speaking at 11.45 am on ‘The trends shaping the future of enterprise search 2010-2013’ and then I’m participating on a panel at the end of the day on what search will look like in 2015. As I’m already making predictions through 2013, I’m three-fifths of the way there! Oct 21 is also the day of Autonomy’s Q3 results call so the place should be full of lively discussion regarding that.

Come November I’m doing a couple more webinars:

On Nov 11 I’m participating on one with Zylab, the focus of which will be litigation-readiness, moving beyond just eDiscovery to insuring organizations have their information in a state such that it can be easily searched, accessed, locked down, deleted or produced to an opposing party.

Also in November I’ll be participating in a webinar with Attensity Group, which will be focused on social media and the application of text analytics to that space. Date TBC and links to follow, most likely on my Twitter feed.

451 clients will be getting our fill report on this deal today, so I won’t be spilling all our thoughts on the deal (or all the details of the structure) here. But here’s a few initial thoughts on the news:

• The new entity will comprise a bigger threat against the many text analysis competitors recently acquired by much larger companies, notably Teragram by SAS, ClearForest by Reuters and Inxight by Business Objects (and subsequently by SAP), as well as SPSS, which got into this business via acquisition back in 2003.
• Such deals aren’t usually done from a position of dominance and it’s fair to say that Attensity wasn’t growing as fast as it used to be. They’re driven in part by investors who either want a payout now or see the potential for one by adding heft to a company and thus getting some economies of scale.
• Attensity remains in the voice of the customer business, but adds a few more, including customer self-service.
• CEO Ian Bonner and CTO Ian Hersey are back together almost two years since selling Inxight.
• Hersey now has a major software integration job on his hands for the next couple of years.