I was in a discussion the other day with HP's research lead Prith Banerjee. One of the research areas he talked about was Taxonom a data classification SaaS. This project is focused on deriving taxonomies from data.

This is always an area I find fascinating, since it is having the computers automate a tasks that is normally done by experts. Experts of course can later look at this and validate the data associations or look through it for unexpected structure.

There are a number of industries that could benefit from this kind of solution. This is one of HP's many XaaS activities.