Cloud Based Angle for Clinical Trial Text Mining
July 10, 2012
Reuters recently posted a news release on its Web site entitled “Linguamatics Launches Cloud-based Clinical Trials Text Mining Solution.”
According to the release, Linguamatics, a provider of cutting edge enterprise text mining software, is now providing access to clinical trials via their I2E text mining platform available on the Cloud. This solution has proven to be a valuable tool when mining clinical trials data for decision support in biomedical research, clinical trials study design, site selection and competitive intelligence. Users are able to extract valuable insights and monitor the progress of potential new medicines.
When discussing how I2E works, the article states:
“According to David Milward, CTO, Linguamatics, the company intends to further extend its hosted content sources to full-text patent applications and grants, and exploit links across the data sets. ‘Access to ClinicalTrials.gov is a strong addition to our existing content options. As well as each data source being valuable in itself, I2E provides the ability to link across diverse sources using natural language processing to recognize relevant concepts and relationships however they are expressed’.”
The medical field is certainly an industry where text mining solutions like 12E are bound to make a huge difference in new cutting edge research by allowing them to access information that was not previously available.
Jasmine Ashton, July 10, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
Oracle Positions RightNow Technology
July 7, 2012
Since Oracle bought RightNow Technologies last October, we’ve been wondering how their customer-service-cloud technology will be positioned under new management. Oracle’s blog gives us some insight in the post, “Oracle RightNow CX for Good Customer Experiences.” Besides detailing the uses of RightNow as they fit within the larger Oracle universe, the article lists Oracle University classes that can get users up to speed on the software.
Blogger Andreea Vaduva describes four tools available in the customer relations suite: the Knowledge Authoring tool; the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal; the Contact Centre Experience Designer; and Oracle RightNow access points. See the write up for details on each. She notes that marketing, survey creation and tracking, and sales tools are also included. Regarding the analytics tool, Vaduva enthuses:
“Cue Oracle RightNow Analytics – fully integrated across the entire platform – Service, Marketing and Sales – there are in excess of 800 standard reports. If this were not enough, a large proportion of the database has been made available via the administration console, allowing users without any prior database experience to write their own reports, format them and schedule them for e-mail delivery to a distribution list. It handles the complexities of table joins, and allows for the manipulation of data with ease.”
It sounds like Oracle is making good use of its purchase. RightNow Technologies was founded in 1997 in Bozeman, Montana. No stranger to the acquisition game, the smaller company snapped up HiveLive in 2009, and Q-go in 2011.
Cynthia Murrell, July 7, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Welcome Eucalyptus Back to Full Open Source
July 1, 2012
Open source beckons a stray back into the fold, we learn in The H Open’s “Eucalyptus Moves Back to Full Open Source.” According to Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, Version 3.1 of Eucalyptus consolidates the company’s technologies into a single, open source version. Previously, Eucalyptus produced separate open source and enterprise editions. Source code is available through GitHub, where all new development will take place. The defect and feature tracking is to be publicly available so any community member can follow the progress of an issue.
Of the new version, the write up reports:
“The 3.1 release builds on version 3.0 which offered high-availability features, Amazon Web Services API extensions, rapid instancing, improvements to EBS (elastic block storage) and Windows image support, a redesigned administration console and better CLI admin tools. Eucalyptus signed a deal with Amazon in March which saw the companies agree to work on hybrid and on-premises clouds together. The company has been under increasing pressure with the visible rise of OpenStack and CloudStack projects which also offer IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service] cloud management.”
It seems OpenStack and CloudStack are making for some healthy competition. It will be interesting to see how that partnership with Amazon works out.
Eucalyptus supplies IT and tech-oriented businesses with the(currently) most widely-deployed cloud software platform for on-premise Infrastructure as a Service. The platform began as a research project at the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2007. Eucalyptus was commercialized in 2009, when it began to make its way through Linux distribution channels. Headquartered in Goleta, CA, the company also has an office in Beijing.
Cynthia Murrell, July 6, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Rumor or Revisionism: Google to the Cloud!
June 23, 2012
I read with some amusement “Google to launch Amazon, Microsoft cloud rival at Google I/O.” The main idea is that Google is going to roll out cloud services to compete with Amazon but really the purpose is to compete with Microsoft. Read the GigaOM “real” journalist story and decide what is being reported.
My view is that Google has been a cloud vendor from its earliest days. In The Google Legacy I described some Google research which made Google the “cloud” and everything thing was within Google. I did a briefing for some wild and crazy telecommunications folks in which a diagram showed that a telecommunications partner offering Internet service would have content and services delivered from the Google cloud. Sharply reduced latency was part of the plan. Google served the digital goods from its servers to which the telco partner would be party to the plan.
The date? 2004. My sources included information dating back to 2001.
Google in the cloud? Yep. What seems to be mesmerizing folks is that Google may make a public announcement. Be still my heart.
My question remains: Why has Google delayed bundling its cloud services for years. The foot dragging allowed Amazon to deploy most of the services with which Google engineers were fiddling.
A second question: Why has Google not moved enterprise search to the cloud? Google touts that it is a hardware company, but the Google Search Appliance is out of phase with the shift some firms are making to hosted or cloud services.
My hunch as a non journalist is that Google does not have the ability to execute and, thus, finds itself tagging along after others are in the market and enjoying a modicum of success.
Why? What about management? What about the ability to do something about market trends before those trends ossify? Honk. (If you want to receive our free, registration required newsletter Honk!, write thehonk at yandex dot com. I am more blunt in the original essay which is distributed every Tuesday at 7 am Eastern.)
Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
Amazon EC2 Pricing
June 8, 2012
Short honk. “Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison” provides some interesting data and pricing information about Amazon’s cloud services. Worth tucking away for reference. Taxi meter pricing is interesting. Like a ride with a New York City taxi driver from Kazakhstan, the cost of the trip can be surprising.
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2012
Oracle Chases Customer Support
June 6, 2012
Computer Business Review recently reported on Oracle integrating RightNow with Fusion in the article “Oracle Integrates RightNow CX Cloud Service With Fusion Sales.”
According to the article, Oracle has now integrated its RightNow CX Cloud customer experience suite with Fusion Sales in order to help organizations facilitate relevant cross channel customer interactions by improving revenue and making processes more efficient.
RightNow, a U.S. company that incorporates search technology, acquired Q-Go, a European natural language search system, in 2011. Since this acquisition the firm has been able to extend and improve its services. The additional $8 million in revenue helped make the CX Cloud experience suite possible.
The article states:
“The integrated applications also provides a cross-channel view of the customer to sales, marketing and service, allows sales to review service history in preparation for sales calls and empowers sales and service departments to collaborate to solve customer issues, using opportunities to provide purchase advice at the right time and with the right applications.”
This new suite of products will be able to allow organizations to deliver a more targeted approach to customer needs.
Jasmine Ashton, June 6, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
IBM on Cloud Control
June 6, 2012
It is good to know IBM is asserting leadership in the cloud. Wired Cloudline (sponsored by IBM, by the way) reports: “IBM to the World: on Cloud Computing, You’ve Got Nothing on Us.” IBM recently put out a lengthy press release filled with details about its cloud services and who uses it. For example, about a million application users work in the IBM Cloud, and that Cloud processes 4.5 million transactions daily.
Writer Todd Nielsen shares (and comments upon) some highlights from the press release:
“*A New 99.9% Service Level Agreement for Smart Cloud Enterprise (Wow… not many cloud providers can promise that)
*Developers seem to be lining up with over 30 new ISV’s validated for IBM Smart Cloud (Cloud Providers live and die from applications. It is a strong statement that developers are seeing the value of the platform)
*SmartCloud Enterprise available in North America and Europe with plans for additional global roll-out in Q3 2012. (An important move for global business that not a lot of cloud providers can provide)
*Several tools are services are mentioned to improve and ease migration and transferring applications to the cloud.
*Improved licensing management and support for many operating systems and software packages”
Many more tidbits are available in both the write up and the original press release, including details on how different companies are using the resource. As Nielsen observes, it is clear that IBM has a good handle on this cloud thing. However, he wonders: how will IBM resellers benefit from all of this? Or will they?
We have a suggestion for Big Blue: why not run an instance of Watson in this cloud so we can explore its excellence?
Cynthia Murrell, June 6, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
A Semi New Approach to 1970 Timesharing
May 29, 2012
IBM seems to be reversing the old saying, ‘out with the old and in with the new’ according to the article IBM to park mainframes on the cloud. The basis behind their approach plays a familiar song to those that were computer savvy back in the 70’s.
Perhaps this is a new marketing tactic rather than a new system as:
“IBM is also promising to park its System z mainframe servers on the cloud, which is ironic considering the time-sharing, rental base ancient history of System/360 mainframes from the dawn of the computing age. (It’s even funnier if you think of a mainframe, which has had logical partitioning, multi-tenancy, and application frameworks of a sort for more than two decades now, as a kind of private cloud.)”
This diagram provides a visual for what is to come:
According to IBM, they currently have over a million users running applications on the SmartCloud processing 4.5 million transactions per day. They hope to increase that with this new, yet familiar software stack which will include; a basic processor, tape capacity with virtual tape, a disc, flash copy and mirroring services for disks. IBM plans to have their mainframes added to the SmartCloud in the United States and United Kingdom later on in 2012. We thought this was the 1970s approach to time sharing, but according to IBM, it is now it a “new” approach?
Jennifer Shockley, May 29, 2012
Is IBM Delivering a Speedier File System?
May 27, 2012
IBM’s Parallel file system just got a makeover, but speed and synchronization took a hit in the process. The article IBM Parks Parallel File System on Big Data’s Lawn gives us a breakdown on the pros and cons of GPFS 3.5.
On a positive note, this is a big data friendly system. GPFS has a multi-cluster synchronous replication feature enabling a central site to be mirrored with remote sites. The user gets continuous file access to mirrored sites.
Clients lose some control with the new GPFS. Data access is only available at a lessor local network speed instead of high speed. Users also can’t control the amount of data they take in from mirrored sites.
GPFS adds additional user requirements as;
“IBM expected GPFS customers to use flash storage with de-clustered RAID to hold its specific metadata.”
“GPFS is pretty much independent of what goes on below the physical storage.”
“GPFS 3.5 can also be run in a shared-nothing, Hadoop-style cluster and is POSIX-compliant, unlike Hadoop’s HFS. GPFS 3.5 is big-data capable and can deliver big insights from a big insight cluster. This release of GPFS does not, however, have any HFS import facility.”
One might view the overall convenience as a balance to the issues. However, when speed and synchronicity are necessary, GPFS’s efficiency is put to question. We like the parallel file system, but we have to wonder if synchronization is a concern?
Jennifer Shockley, May 27, 2012
Scoop: Is It a Surprise That Google and Microsoft Target Amazon?
May 22, 2012
Okay, “real” journalists are causing my blood pressure medicine to work overtime. I did not know that Amazon was a big deal. I am delighted that a major “real” news outfit reported for the first time in the history of mankind this insight: “Scoop: Google, Microsoft Both Targeting Amazon with New Clouds.” The insight which knocked me on my tail feathers was:
Google and Microsoft are two cloud providers that should have Amazon Web Services shaking a bit, in a way Rackspace and the OpenStack haven’t yet been able to. Google and Microsoft both have the engineering chops to compete with AWS technically, and both have lots of experience dealing with both developers and large companies. More importantly, both seem willing and able to compete with AWS on price — a big advantage for AWS right now as its economies of scale allow it to regularly slash prices for its cloud computing services.
Even though we have provided some insight to our hopeless befuddled investment bank clients, we totally missed the fact that Amazon had a cloud service, that Google and Microsoft seem to be playing a me too game, and that Amazon is rolling out new services.
How could the goslings have failed me? We thought Amazon was really a purveyor of hard backed books and diapers? I expect that the financial outfits who pay us to analyze the more subtle aspects of companies engaged in online will be firing us in the next minute or two. Now I know my IQ is below 70, not even “dull normal.”
I suppose I can become a WalMart greeter.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2012
Sponsored by no one. I mean who would pay money to an outfit who did not know that Google and Microsoft were interested in cloud revenue.
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