Yup, this is a big issue, and obviously our lives would be easier if everyone was happy for us to just gobble up their data. As I've mentioned elsewhere, we want to enable a scenario where we know your schema and ontology, and can therefore generate the query. That allows us to query on your network, but as you say, there's still a huge trust issue.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the minimum desirable interaction here - is an API that just translates natural language to, say, SQL useful enough for you to pay for?

> is an API that just translates natural language to, say, SQL useful enough for you to pay for?

Definitely!

If you get the natural language to SQL right, then it is multitudes easier for me as a developer to parse a JSON and display the results to an interface than having to learn the natural language processing part by myself and then try to interact and implement with it!

EDIT: I wanted your email. Nevermind, I found it.

I'll add that as an option on the survey actually, ta. The primary thing we need to know right now are realistic integration scenarios.

Yes an API or library for text > SQL is well worth paying for. Enterprise library in Java something like $2k per install for internal use, $10k for use on a web server would fairly standard. Bare in mind that a lot of enterprises use ORMs which you may need to interoperable with.

The tricky bit is going to be your enterprise sales channel, you need someone with the right connections.

Consider a productized, installable version.

Yeah, that's a decent option. We'll already have the problem of supporting software in the customer's environment, so it's not really a huge leap to imagine a fully local version or an appliance.

An appliance :)

It might be a completely worthless idea, but I would consider offering a "USB Stick" version rather than an appliance. It is much easier to replace, costs close to nothing, yet it can still be implemented as a self-contained blackbox with no customer serviceable parts.

It's got to be a Raspberry Pi, surely?

@slmt - you are shadow-banned.

Total speculation but Java is mentioned and it's very common in Javaland to sell enterprises highly priced components to use on their own codebases. It's not the sexiest way technology like this could be used but it could certainly form the base of a lucrative business. (Indeed, they could do that to make the business worthwhile while still doing something more sexy and modern as a third party service.)

We are indeed a JVM shop. Doing something resembling consultancy is a fallback position for us. We don't want to reject big contracts, obviously, but in many ways the more technically challenging problem we'd like to solve is making an NLP product that's portable between different apps. We think we're getting there for certain sizes and classes of app, but we'll see where the market takes us when we have a saleable product.

Absolutely sell/license the portable component. Doesn't have to be a consultancy thing (although it might have to be in the beginning). Either as a library or as a standalone server like Solr. 99.99% of data in the world that this is relevant for (sales/revenue numbers, finance etc) is locked away and you are never, ever, going to get access to it on servers you control.

Yeah, this is the model that I had in mind. There's a giant enterprise (and government!) market for this sort of stuff who rarely venture out into places as cool as HN ;-) (They can be tricky to sell to though given the time involved and even finding them in the first place.)

The issue we have with that market is twofold:

1) they often have sprawling, disparate data sources, with schemas designed by deranged people in the 80s or 90s. The cleaner (and admittedly smaller) your data, the easier you can integrate, and to be honest, there's probably a hard limit at some point beyond which we couldn't provide value without doing bespoke customisation.

2) there are some fearsome competitors at the higher level of the market, who offer wider business intelligence suites.

This may be fear-based thinking though.

If you're not afraid, you're doing it wrong.

1) The more sprawling and disparate the data sources, the more deranged the schemas, the more money to be had making sense of it.

2) Enterprise consultancies are ripe for disruption. There exist exactly zero satistifed customers of these companies.

Yup, you're right. Thanks everyone who's focused on this issue.

Are there any well-known purveyors? I've been thinking of developing components to sell recently and was looking for some examples of what's already on the market to compare and contrast.

So why not just sell it as a product rather than a service?