Hitachi: Thinking Big. Maybe Too Big?
November 28, 2011
I was puzzled when I read that Fujitsu had licensed search technology from the little-known Perfect Search. I have some passing familiarity with the technology, and once one of the Perfect Search wizards bought me fried tofu. My favorite meal! You can read about the Perfect Search Fujitsu deal in “Fujitsu Launches NuVola Private Cloud Platform Solution Featuring Transformative Appliance-Based Network Software Tools and Utilities.”
However, when I spotted “Hitachi Plans to Sell Systems That Integrate Data from Cities in the Cloud,” I had a new thought. Here’s the key passage:
Hitachi, which manufactures everything from nuclear power plants to mobile phones, said it aims for revenues of US$6.5 billion in the fiscal year through March, 2016 from cloud-related business, a big jump from the US$900 million it generated last fiscal year in the business.
Big money.
We have Fujitsu making big data noises. We have Hitachi making bigger data noises. My thoughts:
- The Japanese conglomerates are a bit like sheep. When MITI or another Japanese government agency drops a hint, the companies move.
- Whether the prospects realize they need the Japanese solution, the marketers will descend and make logical arguments about the proposed remedy to to computing woes.
- The efforts will be what I call a “sort of” success. IBM, Google, and other “big data” next-generation solutions providers will fight back.
Will struggling US cities ship their borrowed money to the Land of the Rising Sun? Long shot. And search? Further commoditization and value degradation ahead. This will be interesting to watch as Japan’s biggest companies attempt a half gainer with a twist.
Stephen E Arnold, November 28, 2011
Sponsored Pandia.com
Oracle Starts its Move on Open Source NoSQL
November 24, 2011
The adult has arrived on the scene. At least, that’s the perspective InfoWorld takes in “First look: Oracle NoSQL Database.” In describing the history of NoSQL development up to this point, the article asserts:
For the last few years, the world of NoSQL databases has been filled with exciting new projects, ambitious claims, and plenty of chest beating. The hypesters said the new NoSQL software packages offered tremendous performance gains by tossing away all of the structure and paranoid triple-checking that database creators had lovingly added over the years. . . . If we ignore these things, our databases will be free and insanely fast.
Specifically, these open source developers have eschewed adherence to the ACID (atomicity, consistence, isolation, durability) standards that guarantee the reliability of database transactions. While Oracle’s version doesn’t strictly adhere to these, either, it does come much closer than its forerunners. It also offers the option to partition data, which guarantees consistency across node-replicating machines.
Writer Peter Wayner gives an in depth comparison between Oracle NoSQL and the other options, often lauding the former for being more “serious” (that is to say, more reliable.) The piece also details the results of his own speed test. Definitely worth a read for anyone considering the move to Oracle, or any other NoSQL database. And open source? Would a toll booth look good on Oracle Parkway?
Cynthia Murrell, November 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SQL 2012 SharePoint Enhancements
November 9, 2011
The recent SharePoint Conference gives users a lot to look forward to (see: enhancements formerly known as “Denali.”) There are some big things worth noting and paying attention to.
One of my favorite bloggers gave a list of what’s coming and people should be excited. A great recap of SQL 2012 is discussed by SharePoint Joel in his post, “Top 10 SQL 2012 ‘Denali” Enhancements for SharePoint.” He covers big points, such as SQL Reporting Services, cross farm reporting, and security improvements. However, the big focus is on disaster recovery. We learned:
Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Improvements – Always On – this was the big one. At the SharePoint Conference they showed an automatic failover of a 14 TB database in less than one minute. There’s a ton in here. Improvements to combining the best of log shipping and mirroring into one. Such as automatic failover for groups of databases with automatic or manual failover or failover an entire instance of SQL. Don’t forget the ability to do failover multi site across subnets with encryption and compression built in and with multiple secondaries.
Search Technologies is working closely with Microsoft and is on top of these innovations. The team maintains deep expertise in these leading search products and no matter what changes or challenges come, Search Technologies has the people, processes, and technologies to deliver results. www.searchtechnologies.com
Iain Fletcher, November 9, 2011
Search Technologies
Datafiniti: Is a Successful Data Search Engine Possible?
November 1, 2011
A Houston-based startup is looking to change the world of open source search and public data, a difficult yet honorable task.
Datafiniti is taking on the challenge, which proves to be especially troublesome for users who don’t know data is available and don’t know how to work the programs to get to the information they want and need. Datafiniti hopes to make the task as simple as a basic Google search for Web sites.
The web-based service requires SQL parameters to be entered into a search box. Once users get the information they need, they can use the API in their own applications or export it.
GigaOM’s article “Datafiniti Builds a Web scale Search Engine for Data,” tells us more about the service. We learned:
The service is pretty clearly targeted at developers wanting to build data-centric web applications and, as founder and CEO Shion Deysarkar explained to me, Datafiniti tries to differentiate itself with the aforementioned API. Users get just one API that offers up access to multiple data types, which contrasts with the traditional mash up experience of using a different API for each data source. As of a couple of weeks ago, Deysarkar told me Datafiniti consisted of about 15 million records, but it’s constantly growing, and his goal is to index ‘any and all structured data on the Web.’
Our opinion? This is a good idea. But can the project be sustained? The US government cut back on data.gov, and Google is ridding itself of their open source search next year. Perhaps a more user-friendly interface will help.
Andrea Hayden, November 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Oracle Embraces Big Data
October 26, 2011
What search vendor has as many findability solutions as OpenText? Answer: Oracle.
It seems like Oracle finally peered all the way over the virtual white picket fence and caught a glance of HP’s newest splurge on big data, Vertica. Wired reported on this “keeping up with the Joneses” effect with their article, “Oracle Mimics HP with ‘Big Data’ Buy.”
Endeca brings a MDEX analytics engine with a vertical record database instead of classic tables to the table.
“The marketing materials go so far as to espouse MDEX’s value over classic relational databases — such as those offered by Oracle. This new weapon in the Oracle arsenal is designed to compete with such platforms as Hadoop — the open source distributed, number-crunching platform — and the analytics software offered by recent HP acquisition Autonomy, a Cambridge, UK-based company.”
Sounds good. Just one hitch. Endeca is one of those late 1990 search systems, not one of the whizzy NoSQL systems built to scale.
While the competition heats up, it seems that the real story may be what Oracle paid for Endeca’s customer list, its e-commerce technology, and its MBA-style sales approach.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison seems to be on to this in his recent roast of Autonomy. Of course, Autonomy is not really big data–it is multiple well-managed content processing technologies.
Although Oracle has taken pot shots at Hewlett Packard, now Oracle is replicating some of the HP organization’s strategy. HP’s entrance into big data and their latest move has been matched with Oracle’s chess moves.
Have both HP and Oracle lost sight of the fact that their spate of acquisitions may have more to do with one another than with the marketplace’s appetite to buy technology that is a wee bit old?
Megan Feil, October 26, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Tableau 6.1 Available for Apple iPad
October 25, 2011
App mania is in full stride.
Seattle based rapid-fire business intelligence software producer, Tableau Software, http://www.tableausoftware.com/ has gained recognition for performing “simple business analytics,” has now made Tableau 6.1 available for public use and can be made available on the iPad. This is important because most apps insulate the user from of the messy fiddling old style enterprise applications required. Some were beyond the MBA and required a programmer, who, in theory, could verify that data were clean and the functions appropriate to the data set available.
The Tableau blog post “Tableau Makes Business Intelligence Faster and Mobile” states:
The new version delivers automatic touch and gesture optimized support for the Apple iPad, whether views are accessed via Tableau’s new iPad App or via Mobile Safari. In addition, Tableau enhanced its in-memory analytics engine with increased query and loading performance. People can also rapidly update existing extracts in Tableau’s data engine. Other improvements include localization and new maps.”
In addition to having an even faster in-memory data engine, what’s really cool about this new version is that through the new iPad app, you can still create quick and easy interactive dashboards and reports from both Tableau Server and Tableau Public. There is no need for up-front design changes or maintaining multiple versions of workbooks to serve multiple platforms and when a view is accessed from the iPad, Tableau automatically detects and optimizes the user experience.
Several observations:
- Will end users know what data delivered the output?
- Are the data fresh? How will end users know?
- Will end users make a decision based on a graph and some highlights?
Our thought is, “Many users will accept what’s on the iPad as accurate.” In some situations, the assumption may be incorrect by a little or a lot.
For more information on Tableau 6.1 and any other Tableau happenings, feel free to check out the company blog.
Jasmine Ashton, October 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Make Case-Based Approximate Reasoning a Reality
October 23, 2011
I stumbled across an interesting book on Amazon.com that has received a great deal of attention over he past few years. The book is called Case-Based Approximate Reasoning (CBR) by Eyke Hullermeier.
CBR has established itself as a core methodology in the field of artificial intelligence. The key idea of CBR is to tackle new problems by referring to similar problems that have already been solved in the past. One reviewer wrote:
In the last years developments were very successful that have been based on the general concept of case-based reasoning. … will get a lot of attention and for a good while will be the reference for many applications and further research. … the book can be used as an excellent guideline for the implementation of problem-solving programs, but also for courses in Artificial and Computational Intelligence. Everybody who is involved in research, development and teaching in Artificial Intelligence will get something out of it.
The problem with CBR can be the time, effort, and cost required to create and maintain the rules. Automated systems work well if the inputs do not change. Flip in some human unpredictability and the CBR system can require baby sitting.
Jasmine Ashton, October 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Microsoft Gets Some Open Source Ideas
October 21, 2011
Wired reported on some good news for the open source community recently with their article, “Microsoft Embraces Elephant of Open Source.”
Even though Microsoft had an inaugural Hadoop back in 2008, we could hardly say they had an affinity for the open source giant then. In fact, I don’t even think we could say that about them now, even with their plan to integrate the platform with future versions of its relational database, SQL Server, and its platform cloud, Windows Azure, an online service for hosting and readily scaling applications.
This does however, show they are serious about Hadoop, unlike their relationship last year with OpenStack. Microsoft’s engineers are even investing by providing the coding for this Hadoop integration.
According to the article, the strengthening of this Microsoft-Hadoop partnership isn’t just coming out of nowhere. Wired reports that general manager of product management for SQL Server Doug Leland said:
There have certainly been requests from our [SQL Server and Windows Azure] customers to embrace Hadoop and deliver an enterprise-class distribution of the platform that’s built into the Windows infrastructure and is easily managed within that infrastructure,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.
It appears that this is set to be a steady long-term relationship; we can hear Open Source advocates cheering from all around. The question, of course, is, “Will open source survive Microsoft’s love and attention?”
Megan Feil, October 20, 2011
Too Much Data? Digital Reasoning Has a Solution
October 21, 2011
More and more businesses are turning to companies specializing in analytics to simplify the massive amounts of data and turn that data into meaningful information. Digital Reasoning is one such company and a recent interview with Robert Metcalf, president, as found on the company’s website sheds light on Digital Reasoning’s past, present and optimistic future.
The company was born in 2000 in Franklin, Tennessee, and has had some impressive accomplishments in its first decade. Synthesys, its technology’s name, was chosen in 2009 by the United States Army Intelligence as the core of its INSCOM Enterprise Platform.
Alongside government entities, Digital Reasoning also supplies analytics to the commercial sector. One of the questions asked during the interview was what are the challenges servicing both government and commercial industries. According to Metcalf that challenge of providing a service that can be made applicable across several industries is one of the components that makes Synthesys unique and gives Digital Reasoning an edge in the market.
When asked about the accomplishments over the last year, Metcalf said:
…we are very pleased with the course over the last number of months, and particularly over the course of this year, the strides we’ve made with regard to our technology, particularly with respect to the work we’ve done with our analytics, our algorithms, and our approach to unstructured data, and leveraging some great technologies in Hadoop and Cassandra and seeing those things continue to mature and scale as our product and product roadmap continues to be developed.
Metcalf also reported that he believes the last ten years have been spent trying to sort through all the data that companies by which companies are bombarded. While that is a useful process and quite necessary he sees the next ten years moving toward finding meaning within the data. That is where Digital Reasoning comes in useful and Metcalf anticipates a surge in interest in the company as a result.
All and all, Digital Reasoning is poised to explode in the market of data analysis and vertical filing. With its ducks seemingly in a row and successes already under its belt, this sophomore company gets a big thumbs up from us.
Catherine Lamsfuss, October 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
D&B Rolls Out D&B Direct
October 19, 2011
After promising last August to help Salesforce build Data.com, a relational database management system, into a service that fills the gaps created by crowdsourcing, Dun & Bradstreet announced, on October 4, that they are building in a new direction, launching a Web Services API called D&B Direct.
D&B Direct is a new application programming interface which makes it possible to access D&B’s business information from any application or platform. The goal is to allow clients to use their own applications to utilize live, professionally researched data on the world’s businesses.
According to the ReadWrite Hack article, Dun & Bradstreet on the Value of Researched vs. Crowdsourced Data Mike Sabin, vice president of sales and marketing solutions for D&B said:
D&B has built out this infrastructure that allows us to identify companies, track them over time, link pieces of data to those companies, and put them in the broader context of their corporate hierarchies, so that you can see the entire picture. I think being able to use those things as ‘coat hangers,’ if you will, on which you can hang additional pieces of information, becomes very important with the coming explosion of data that everybody’s seeing down the pike.
Having applications that can make high value content available for decision makers is a pied piper offering. We still think this technology needs expert human analysts and information professionals to use those promising platforms.
Jasmine Ashton, October 19, 2011
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