Goldman Sachs has invested in a .NET-based solution for intelligent content mining and has entered into a joint marketing agreement to offer the solution to its global investor client base. The solution, Information Agent Suite (IAS) from Connotate Technologies, uses intelligent information agents to gather and aggregate updates or changes in information on key Web sites that a user chooses to monitor, without the need for complex programming.

“When we showed this to Goldman Sachs they shared what a great need there is for tools for managing and gathering research data and they said ‘it’s an arms race,’” said Bruce Molloy, CEO and chairman of Connotate Technologies.

Goldman Sachs managing director Michael Sanders confirmed that the firm saw the product as a strong fit for global investor clients. “We believe that Connotate's product offerings will have broad applicability across our global investor client base,” he said. “We are currently witnessing an intense race among investment firms to obtain more primary, specialized research and tools.”

The tool allows users to assign agents to sites they want to monitor and the agents alert the users whenever the data on those sites changes or new information appears. As a research aggregation tool, the agents can streamline information from sites with varied formats into a uniform format, enabling users to quickly compare apples to apples. The agents can populate the data into an Excel spreadsheet or a database and the data is easily assembled into charts or graphs.

IAS is built on the premise that the main question analysts and investors ask as they search the Web for information on companies and products is “What’s changed?” according to Molloy.

Molloy said that with increased regulatory scrutiny and a trend toward unbundling, members of the financial community increasingly want to do research themselves. But he cites statistics from Outsell and The Intertek Group that show an average fund manager spends 25 percent to 35 percent of his time just looking for information and workers are now spending more time searching for data than using it – a reversal from 2001.