Exorbyte Receives 2010 German State Prize
November 8, 2010
Thanks to Exorbyte’s ingenuity, spelling is no longer an issue in searches. Not surprising from a company whose motto is “Seek and you shall find, even if the search term is misspelled”.
Exorbyte, headquartered in Konstanz, Germany and operating out of Portland Oregon, has developed a unique, extreme high speed search solution for large amounts of data that does not require additional hardware. The kicker is this product is intelligent enough to have a high fault tolerance, “correcting all spelling and other data errors on the fly or by suggestion”.
The article “Exorbyte at the State Prize for Young Companies” shows the jurors of the 2010 State Prize did not fail to notice such a great feat, selecting Exorbyte as one of the ten recipients. Industry has taken notice as well, with Exorbyte’s client list including the Alliance, the Federal Treasury, the Federal Central Tax Office, the German Post and Yahoo.
Exorbyte offers three high-end search platforms for structured data ranging from common commerce applications to the largest databases and data warehouses, making the products useful to small online stores and government agencies alike. Not to mention poor-spellers.
Sarah Rogers, November 6, 2010
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LexisNexis Adds Content
November 6, 2010
LexisNexis is bringing the world together one search at a time. “LexisNexis TotalPatent Becomes First Patent Research Service to Provide Direct Links to….” Practically everywhere! LexisNexis’s new version of TotalPatent provides researchers the ability to search SciVerse Scopus, a virtual plethora of articles just waiting to be utilized by professionals in the scientific, medical,technical and social science fields.
“In conversations and visits with our customers, we learned how valuable it would be for them to have direct access to non-patent journal articles without having to leave TotalPatent and conduct those searches independently,”
TotalPatent also links up to Chisum on Patents. Chisum is the foremost authority on patent laws in the United States. Here’s the really cool part. TotalPatent includes English language software. It can translate foreign articles into the English language. All of these new improvements allow researchers to work more efficiently and accurately.
No word on prices for the new service.
Leslie Radcliff, November 6, 2010
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Oracle ATG Deal Leaves Other eCommerce Vendors at the Alter
November 4, 2010
Who is getting the bride’s bouquet? Endeca, one of the pioneers in faceted search for eCommerce? EasyAsk, one of the hidden gems in eCommerce? Exorbyte, a company run with an intentionally low profile and a “can do” attitude?
Nope. No one caught the bouquet. Oracle’s vision was articulated in the deal write up “Oracle and ATG”:
Driven by the convergence of online and traditional commerce and the need to increase revenue and improve customer loyalty—organizations across many industries are seeking a unified cross-channel commerce and customer relationship management platform to deliver a cohesive customer experience across all commerce channels.
Assumptions, assertions, and wordsmithing entertain me. I think the key to the deal appears in the news release “Oracle Buys ATG”:
More than 1,000 global enterprises rely on ATG’s solutions to help increase the value of their online customer interactions,” said Bob Burke, President and CEO, ATG. “This combination will enhance the ability to bring all their commerce activities together – creating a more consistent and relevant experience for their customers across all interaction channels, including online, in stores, via mobile devices and with call centers.”
See the hook? More customers, more than 1,000. Pay $1 billion, get 1,000 customers. Oh, Oracle also gets Endeca, a partner of ATG.
With organic growth getting more and more difficult, litigation and acquisition become the two draft horses of revenue or at least that’s how I see the deal.
What about search? What these outfits have is good enough. Maybe? Maybe not?
Stephen E Arnold, November 4, 2010
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ZoomInfo Offers Additional Paid Services
October 31, 2010
ZoomInfo, one of the leading providers or business and employee information will start offering paid services to its users through two platforms – ZoomInfo Community Edition (CE) and ZoomInfo Pro. “ZoomInfo Introduces new Database Search Tool” said:
The application offers more than 20 search fields for companies—by such delineators as name, industry, revenue, size and location—and people—by name, job title, industry and college attended, among other data. The product also includes alerting tools to track updates to profiles,
The Pro edition will enable the users to lookup in-depth business and executive profiles, whereas the CE edition will provide links to social media profiles. This will be achieved by allowing people listed on ZoomInfo to directly synchronize the information from their Outlook Express to the ZoomInfo’s database providing a timely and accurate data to its paid users.
Small businesses often die like mayflies. ZoomInfo has taken steps to keep its content more accurate. The business services provider now has overcome this particular problem by letting a listed user update his/her information directly.
ZoomInfo scrapes and harvests information about business professionals and populates the ZoomInfo database. The system challenges companies like Dun & Bradstreet and InfoUSA as well as LinkedIn, Jigsaw and Spoke. Sales professionals can tap ZoomInfo for prospects. The company offers a range of for fee plans. ZoomInfo is gaining traction but we try the free services before offering up our charge card.
Stephen E Arnold, October 31, 2010
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Snapshots of Five Big Data Softwares
October 30, 2010
I am not sure who published what in this write up. One link pointed to GigaOM and another to the New York Times. The article in question is “Beyond Hadoop: Next-Generation Big Data Architectures.”
http://www.gigaom.com
The author is Bill McColl, the founder of Cloudscale and a big gun in big data. The write up covers briefly these five systems:
- Cloudscale. Yep, the author’s outfit.
- Dremel for Web scale data sets
- MPI and BSP
- Percolator (Caffeine) which outdoes Hadoop.
- Pregel for social graph analysis
- VoltDB and Clustrix SQL. Yep, still important.
I saved the write up. Useful info.
Stephen E Arnold, October 30, 2010
IBM Pops Open Cognos 10 and Its Fizzes
October 28, 2010
October 29, 2010 — I don’t know about you, but I have been hearing about Cognos for a long time. I understand that it slices, dices, and makes IBM sales engineers giddy with hardware upgrades, software add ons, and consulting services. The most recent news barrage about Cognos (a name I like by the way) strikes me as more autumn public relations fizz than rare earth material. Information Week, ever mindful of the precepts of How to Win Friends and Influence People, revealed:
IBM has packed a lot into the IBM Cognos 10 release it announced Monday, pulling software from SPSS and Lotus into the suite while also upgrading the usability, manageability and performance of the total platform.
The recipe strikes me as “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” The challenge in my opinion is integrating some odds and ends like Lotus collaboration into SPSS number and text crunching. Wrap these functions inside of Cognos and the overall package has quite a few moving parts.
“IBM Cognos 10 Expands BI Boundaries” said [link may go dark]:
Another big push at IBM has been collaboration. That’s something BI vendors like Lyzasoft and SAP BusinessObjects, with its cloud-based StreamWork offering, are already pursuing. The idea is to let BI practitioners share and brainstorm around insights and analyses to improve interpretations of results and advance analyses. Rather than starting from square one, IBM has embedded collaboration capabilities from Lotus Connections right into Cognos 10. Working from familiar Cognos interfaces, users post messages, initiate discussions, post documents and reviews, tap into decision networks, and add comments and annotations on individual data points. When collaborators with appropriate privileges open the same reports, they see the comments and requests for feedback.
The lousy economy has been a boon for some data analytics companies. But raw horsepower embodied in traditional on premises solutions with an aging grandmother like Lotus collaboration functions is not too exciting to me and the goslings. We think that next generation systems from outfits as diverse as i2 Ltd., Megaputer, Digital Reasoning, and others is where the action is.
But we are not commissioned on our IBM sales and service upsells. Complexity, in our opinion, is engineered into IBM’s most recent Cognos bundle.
Stephen E Arnold
Aleri Live May Breathe Life into SAP Sybase
October 27, 2010
Sybase, now a unit of SAP, is one of the acquisitions that will add sparkle to the aging SAP body panels. Sybase acquired Aleri before the SAP purchase of Sybase. Now Aleri is emerging as a key component in the SAP Sybase complex event processing (shorthand, CEP) service. “Aleri Live OLAP – Powerful Real time OLAP” makes a case for the market potential of this multi dimensional data management and analytics system.
With the increased demand for super fast online analytical processing (shorthand, OLAP), SAP and Sybase see Aleri Live as a pivotal product. What makes Aleri Live stand apart is the CEP engine. A real time data stream enters the OLAP engine. Live data and historical data are aggregated. As a result, the outputs reflect a blend of historical and real-time data. The result, if I understand the Sybase description, is rendering of outputs about what is happening “right now.”
Under the hood, Aleri uses columnar data storage. This form of storage enables the data to be stored in a highly compressed form that is ideal for aggregations by OLAP.
Will Aleri Live give SAP an edge in the real time analytics sector? Aleri’s support for industry standards is a plus. Now about that SAP rebuild? The company has an engine but needs a frame off restoration in my opinion. For more information about Sybase Aleri, navigate to Sybase’s complex event processing Web page.
Stephen E Arnold, October 28, 2010
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DBSight: More Grief for the Commercial RDBMS Dinosaurs
October 25, 2010
On a phone call last week, the participants were annoyed at the baked in enterprise database. Each upgrade cycle, several of the participants reported that their companies just “paid the bill.” Habit, not critical thinking, keeps some of those giant IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle RDBMS installations pump cash from clients into the corporate coffers.
I learned that DBSight is now at Version 4.x (a J2EE search platform) on the call. I first wrote about the system in April 2008 in “DBSight Search: Worth a Closer Look”. The system offers full text search for information stuffed into relational databases. The system can integrate with other languages via XML, JSON, and HTML. The description was that DBSight included a built in database crawler. The system provided a number of knobs and dials. I noted down such functions as faceted search, support for word lists, multi-threaded searching, and some other goodies. In order to handle big data, the system supports multiple indexes and sharded search as well as a number of other speed up methods.
The company coding DBSight has been around since 2004. DBSight has been engineered as a “re-usable search platform.” License fees begin at about $200 but there is a community edition available from this page. If you want an enterprise license, DBSight will provide a custom price quote. I did some poking around and located a link for a free download at http://www.dbsight.net/index.php?q=node/47.
Could an enterprising coder combine some other bits and pieces and create a system that delivers some of the Blue Stream or MarkLogic functionality?
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2010
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Google Waffles Backwards
October 21, 2010
Canada is annoyed at the Google. My view is that Google is mostly indifferent to legal hassles from countries. I mean when an enterprise can blow off the world’s largest market, what’s the difference when the likes of maple leaf lovers get annoyed. But there is an interesting item in the story “Google Ditches All Street View Wi-Fi Scanning.” Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data. The disclosure appeared in a report on Street View released today by Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who said that “collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it.” Assembling an extensive list of the location of Wi-Fi access points can aid in geolocation, especially in areas where connections to cell towers are unreliable. Instead, Stoddart said that, based on her conversations with headquarters in Mountain View, Ca., “Google intends to obtain the information needed to populate its location-based services database” from “users’ handsets.”
No problem in my opinion. My thought is that the Math Club had a plan, a rogue engineer’s code, and some surprised customers. Now the GOOG seems to be doing the type of thinking one expects from a mere MBA. Is this progress? Depends on one’s point of view, right?
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2010
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Hadoop and Business Intelligence
October 20, 2010
InfoWorld’s Data Explosion Web page ran a destroy “Hadoop Pitched for Business Intelligence.” The Hadoop World 2010 conference was a big deal. I spoke with a start up company’s senior business development manager on his way to the event. What surprised me was this passage in the InfoWorld story:
Hadoop offers a unique tool in some circumstances, said Curt Monash of Monash Research. “Hadoop is a great tool for organizing and condensing large amounts of data before it is put into a relational database,” he said. It is also a good tool for companies to analyze relationships between people or things, a practice often known as “social graph analysis,” Monash said. “Traditional relational databases have a difficult time with this, because each hop along the graph exponentially increases the amount of work that needs to be done,” he said. But there are tradeoffs with the technology. For one, you may not want to use it for real time data analysis. Cornelius admits Hadoop has latency issues. Because of its distributed nature, Hadoop is not as fast as other BI systems. But, Cornelius and others argue that Hadoop should not be considered as an alternative to a transactional database system or a data warehouse, but rather something that can do tasks that these technologies would struggle to execute. “It’s not a database. It’s a different kind of data storage and analytics platform. If you have a relational database problem, you should go buy Oracle or DB2,” agreed Mike Olson, Cloudera CEO. To better pursue the BI market, Cloudera has forged partnerships with Pentaho and data warehouse provider Teradata.
I suppose in the interest of balance, InfoWorld has to point out the flaws of Hadoop. The only problem, in my opinion, is that there are firms which have been able to use Hadoop, deliver low latency functionality, and push into territory where once the proprietary vendors ruled.
The reality of open source software is that it is available, it works, and is improving. The “problems” are not those of Hadoop. Plenty of commercial solutions have latency problems and the licensee cannot make fixes or work arounds due to licensing restrictions.
What’s this mean? Once again, the received wisdom overlooks the key strategic flaw in traditional solutions from Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. The fact is that Hadoop-type software offers a path forward, not a path to the lock in of the past. Just my opinion. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2010
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