Mozenda Adds Support for Microsoft Azure

Web scraping platform Mozenda today announced that its data extraction software now supports uploads to Microsoft Azure. The new capability enables users to draw upon web-scraped data for business intelligence and Big Data applications and makes data extracted from web pages usable as CRM, ERP, or other transactional data.

“Our whole platform is based on Microsoft—we use Microsoft tools and software. As we look to become more and more involved with large enterprise deals, obviously Azure is the place to be,” Brett Haskins, CEO of Mozenda, says.

Mozenda provides tools and services that transform web page content into structured data. The solution relies on cloud-based services and aims to streamline the process of collecting and utilizing large volumes of web-based data. The company also implemented an intelligent harvesting protocol in 2012, which automatically identifies website load and adjusts page requests accordingly to maintain normal traffic levels.

With Azure, Mozenda enables companies to add the web as a direct-input data source. Mozenda uses a point-and-click software tool to turn web pages into structured data. Users can train the software through their actions, as well as automate and schedule data collection. The data can be downloaded as a file, or published to other locations for storage and analysis.

“If you think about companies who collect data from the internet—unstructured, raw data, textual data from web pages—a lot of companies will collect a lot of data, millions of pages worth of data. They need to put that in a location that is easily consumable. What we’re offering them now is the ability to take it straight from pages on the web, pull it into the Mozenda system, and then publish it directly to their Azure storage,” Haskins says. He identifies the simple publishing ability, which allows users to publish large amounts of web data to a central storage location, as one of the most important features of the new capability.

“Big Data is a combination of many different data inputs, being used by an enterprise to make the company more profitable, more efficient, to be more strategic. The big missing piece is the ability to tap into the world’s largest database, which is the internet. Very few companies have that capability because the internet is entirely unstructured,” Haskins says. “Mozenda is one of a very few companies—a handful in the world—that specialize in dealing with unstructured data on the web, and then structuring it and publishing it and formatting it in a way that companies can use it. Our goal is to make unstructured web data as usable as structured internal data like CRM data and transactional data.”

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