Beyond Search

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I’m not sure if it’s because Attivio is located less than five miles from Fenway Park and that everyone in that area is, by default, a rabid Sox fan, but I got a preview of a slick new baseball demo they’ve put together to showcase the capabilities of their Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), which is trademarked.

For the upcoming Enterprise Search Summit West in late September, Attivio created a single index that’s composed of more than 700,000 news articles, dating from 2001 to 2007 about baseball. Attivio told me that these were fed into the AIE in XML format. Attivio also processed a dozen comma delimited files that contain baseball statistics such as batting , pitching, player salaries, team information, players post season performances. Here’s the results from my search of steroids.

© Attivio, 2008

Several aspects of this interface struck me as noteworthy. I liked:

1. The ability to enter a word or phrase, a SQL query, or a combination “free text” item and a SQL query. Combining the ambiguity of natural language with the precision of a structured query language instruction gives me the type of control I want in my analytic work. Laundry lists don’t help me much. Fully programmatic systems like those from SAS and SPSS are too unwieldy for the fast-cycle work that I have to do.
2. The point-and-click access to entities, alternative views, and other “facet” functions. Without having to remember how to perform a pivot operation, I can easily view information from structured and unstructured sources with a mouse click. For my work, I often pop between data and information associated with a single individual. The Attivio approach is a time saver, which is important for my work on tight deadlines.
3. Administrative controls. The Attivio 1.2 release makes it easy for me to turn on certain features when I need them; for example, I can disable the syntax view with a mouse click. When I need to fiddle with my search statement, a click turns the function back on. I can jump to an alerts page to specify what I want to receive automatically and configure other parameters.
4. Hit highlighting. I want to be able to spot the key fact or passage without tedious scanning.

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Interviews

No, I did not interview a real lemur. I tracked down Charlie Hull, one of the wizards driving Lemur Consulting forward. The company makes the open source Xapian information retrieval available as the open source FLAX search engine. Lemur, like Tesuji and dozens of other companies, has tapped the power of open source search and content processing software and crafted a successful business.

FLAX, according to Mr. Hull scales. In an exclusive interview for ArnoldIT.com’s Search Wizards Speak series, he said:

The core technology was originally built to search a collection of 500 million Web pages, and scales easily to over four billion items. We’ve implemented indexes of 30-100 million items on a single standard server. It’s also extremely fast to search a Flax database. We routinely see sub-second retrieval times.

You can see the search system in action at MyDeco.com, a UK-based ecommerce site here.

What I found interesting is the by making FLAX available as open source, the company has generated new customers for the firm’s technical consulting and engineering services. Mr. Hull said:

Our view is that any enterprise search system will necessitate some degree of installation, integration or customization - so a customer will always pay for services. However, with open-source you don’t have to pay any license fees on top. In today’s economic climate this cost saving is more and more important. We’ve seen year-on-year growth of the business, as well as a dawning realization that our open-source approach puts the control back in the hands of the customer - you don’t have to take our word for it that the ‘black box’ of enterprise search is working, you have complete visibility and control over the search system.

Mr. Hull’s secret sauce is technical expertise. The company adds a special ingredient that keeps the company on the fast-track–customer service. The firm prides itself on servicing its customers needs.

In an era when “customer support” means “Don’t bother us,” Lemur is an animal with a clever way to snare clients. You can read the full interview here.

Stephen Arnold, July 8, 2008

Profiles

Just when Microsoft makes search “free”, along comes Autonomy and proves that licensing deals are alive and well. According to CRM Buyer, nGenera inked an original equipment manufacturing deal with Autonomy. What’s interesting is that it’s not “search”. The deal is for Web 2.0 technology for search. The application is not finding. The application is knowledge management. I have to be up front and admit that I don’t know what knowledge is. Absent that understanding, I’m baffled at how to manage what I don’t grasp. Nevertheless, the deal is done.

Let’s sort out who is who in this deal. Talisma, according to CRM Buyer, “OEM’ed the Autonomy search engine.” An Autonomy reseller told me that Autonomy’s search engine no longer needs training, and it now shares many features with “appliance like” search systems from Google and Thunderstone, among others. You can get more information about Talisma here. The Talisma catchphrase is “Software that enables an exceptional online customer experience.”

nGenera bought Talisma in May 2008. nGenera’s Steve Papermaster is reported as having said at the time of the deal:

The future of innovation is customer co-creation: talking directly to customers, listening to them, learning from them. We’re taking content and processes from customer interaction software and mashing that with Web 2.0 collaboration tools to help companies discover brilliant new product ideas inspired by their own customers. Source: Paul Greenberg.

nGenera now has its own customer support product line to complement its other management consulting type software offerings. nGenera is a cloud computing - Web 2.0 services firm. The company has a remarkable “manifesto” here that sets forth its vision for organizational operations. One idea in the manifest is that organizations must move from knowledge management” to what the company calls “content collaboration and collective intelligence”. Since I don’t know what “knowledge management” means, I am in the dark about information operations that reach beyond.  The manifesto also advocates moving from “traditional information technology” to “a next generation enterprise platform.”  Again my experience is not much help to me in figuring out what nGenera’s services will deliver. The company has its fingers in many different pies. Each pie is stuffed with Web 2.0 goodness and goodies like “leveraging institutional memory,” “mass collaboration”, “business analytics”, and “transformational change”. These notions are too sophisticated for this addled goose.

The Talisma Knowledgebase which may now incorporate Autonomy technology.

The purchase of Talisma adds what nGenera describes here as:

The leading Customer Interaction Management (CIM) software solution provider enabling organizations globally to deliver an exceptional online customer experience while dramatically increasing their efficiency and effectiveness.  Talisma’s customers include Aetna, AOL, Canon, Citibank, Comcast, Dell, Ford, University of Notre Dame, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, Siemens, Sony, and Sprint.  Talisma is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, and has offices located across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America.

To sum up, nGenera bought Talisma in May 2008. Talisma inked a deal for Autonomy’s search and content processing technology. Autonomy, therefore, “snaps in” to the broader range of nGenera’s Web 2.0 services. Autonomy joins Atlassian Confluence as a technology provider to nGenera.  I must admit these names leave my head spinning.

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