Companies Need Reliable Results Not another Plug and Play Experiment
December 10, 2012
The name Google instantly brings internet search, Android and mobile apps to mind, but that is just not enough for the Big G anymore. TechWeek’s article “Google Enterprise: More Than Just Apps” talks about a new device that Google representatives feel will take the enterprise by storm.
So, what is the next big step for Google? World enterprise domination via plug and play technology:
“This involves something called the ‘Google Search Appliance’ – a yellow box that can be plugged into the data center to look through and index business data. Recently launched Commerce Search is a similar project, but based in the cloud and focused on retail. A different part of the Enterprise department deals with geospatial products: Google Maps, Google Earth and the brand new Google Coordinate – the company’s first geo app to provide not just asset tracking, but the workflow management too.”
Of course this updated Google technology will be compatible with Chrome, Android and existing Google apps, but is this plug and play devise the right answer for sophisticated enterprise needs? What happens when a changes is needed to match unique enterprise requirements? We have found that the mature solutions and dedicated customer service from Intrafind often meets the needs of enterprises with sophisticated requirements. Perhaps a commercial solution, built on open source can better match unique enterprise search needs than a plug and play appliance.
Jennifer Shockley, December 10, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Intrafind Provides Relevant Results throughout Changing Realities
December 6, 2012
Modern technology is changing the way reality can be seen and shown to others. Video cameras and cell phones are being replaced with comfortable, virtually undetectable life capture devices like Google Glasses. These easy to operate wearables literally record all aspects of everyday life, and the lives of those around us.
The collection process is reminiscent of a sci-fi movie, but the data farmed will serve a higher purpose. TechCrunch’s article “Four Perspectives On Augmented Reality And Its Future” explains how developers are taking steps to create devices that not only record, but help users function, think and react:
“Brainwaves in an AR system allows for real-time neuro feedback. This would allow you to know your brain state and have the opportunity to optimize it — being able to choose and be guided into the desired state as you go about your day.The real measure of AR is when it solves real-world problems that may seem boring with realistic and minimal interface. Most AR has had the exciting “wow” factor which lasts for about 15 seconds. It is a big jump from there to useful everyday applications.”
When the initial buzz of the latest, greatest technology trend fades a bit, companies seeking success will be jarred back into reality by the need for relevant results. If your organization wants the security of knowing what theactual reality is, using a search provider like Intrafind that brings that reality to surface may be a better investment than the latest fad.
Jennifer Shockley, December 6, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Efficient Software Leads to Increased Efficiency in Overall Operations and ROI
December 5, 2012
Efficient enterprise operations are a necessity in today’s evolving business world and entrepreneurs are becoming more specific regarding their need for customizable software designs. Their increasing demands have the market flooded with new developers offering pretty buttons and a friendly interface, but end results can often be disappointing.
For the most part, companies share a common thread for cloud operations and the desired end result is ROI. ZDNet’s article “More than Software, as a Service” talks about how developers can stand out in the industry crowd:
“Therefore, what they want delivered from the cloud is rarely software on its own, but software in combination with other non-software components that add up to a useful outcome. This is using the cloud to do what it’s best at — providing access to a pooled, specialist resource that would be hugely more costly to implement separately for each individual business. It wouldn’t be possible to do this without the software (nor the cloud), but it’s the addition of live expertise that completes the service.”
The end result is efficient software leads to increased efficiency in overall operations and ROI. When looking at software options, companies will find utilizing an established developer that offers not only start up project management but also long term software support to be a reliable choice. Professionals can rely on providers such as Intrafind, that can deploy secure search solutions through the cloud that match the demands of the pharmaceutical and financial industries is a safe bet.
Jennifer Shockley, December 5, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
LucidWorks Makes Big Data Useful
December 5, 2012
Enterprise search is such a buzz word, that it not only sounds like a good idea, but it has almost become a mandatory one. Organizations do not sounds relevant or effective unless they have an enterprise search platform in place, and yet finding one that lessens the workload without deepening it is a challenge. Michael Vizard tackles that challenge in his recent article, “LucidWorks Breathes Programmable Life into Big Data and Enterprise Search.”
Vizard begins:
“Collecting data is one thing; however, making actual use of it is another. Enterprise search clearly has a role to play in terms of making Big Data accessible; the challenge is doing it in a way that other applications can utilize. To address that specific issue, LucidWorks this week formally released LucidWorks Big Data, an application development environment that brings together Hadoop, Mahout, Hive and Lucene/Solr enterprise search technology in a way that is designed to make these technologies accessible to the average developer by using a single RESTful application programming interface.”
Vizard goes on to point out that LucidWorks is one of the few serious competitors in the Big Data arena that relies on open source technology. If your organization is considering experimenting with Big Data, LucidWorks may be the only option that makes it both affordable and feasible, with its out-of-the-box operability.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 05, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Inflated Investments Can Be Healed with the Right Tools
December 4, 2012
Plenty is being written about HP’s acquisition of Autonomy at the moment. A view from a historical perspective can be found on Search Technologies’ blog in a piece called, “HP, Autonomy and Meaning-Based M&A.” Autonomy, a UK-based company, began as an enterprise search vendor. Without doubt, in the years since Autonomy has proven to be the most successful company in the sector; some of the reasons for that can perhaps be traced back to 1996 origins and initial engagements with the market.
The article argues that the same factors driving Autonomy’s success in the enterprise search space also drove HP to pay an inflated price. The blog post states:
Autonomy IDOL remains a capable and widely used search engine. It is our collective experience that some customers bought too heavily into the meaning-based vision, and probably paid too much for it. We work with such customers to help them make the most of their investment – and much can be made of it. IDOL is a detailed and capable search engine.
We think the team on Search Technologies provides the information needed to help people make the most of such enterprise search tools. Enterprise search technology customers need to understand their needs and make smart purchases, and it seems Search Technologies can assist in that task.
Andrea Hayden, December 4, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com
Business Intelligence Software Essential to Current Business Decisions
December 3, 2012
Business intelligence (BI) technologies are essential to today’s knowledge workers in the enterprise, providing helpful and necessary decision support software. A recent academic research article addresses the changes and growth in this industry in the past twenty years. The article, “An Overview of Business Intelligence Technology,” published in the August 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM, was written by a team of researchers from Microsoft Research and Hewlett-Packard Lab. According to the article, this rapid growth has been fueled by the declining cost of data storage.
The article states:
“Enterprises today collect data at a finer granularity, which is therefore of much larger volume. Businesses are leveraging their data asset aggressively by deploying and experimenting with more sophisticated data analysis techniques to drive business decisions and deliver new functionality such as personalized offers and services to customers. Today, it is difficult to find a successful enterprise that has not leveraged BI technology for its business.”
This obvious growth accompanies a need to shorten the lag time between acquiring data and decision-making in daily business. Innovations in BI technologies require sophisticated functionality and services. Enterprise search solution Intrafind has a history as a university developed solution that understands the challenges in this industry and the company has created research-based services that solve the problem of making data findable within enterprise environments.
Andrea Hayden, December 3, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Convergence of BI and Enterprise Search Requires Full Service Solution
November 30, 2012
We are starting to see a slow convergence of business intelligence and enterprise search in the world of corporate IT. And according to the article “Business Intelligence, Enterprise Search: Marriage in Prospect, Still No Ring” on Computer Weekly, the catalyst for this convergence may just be the Big Data trend and the continued focus on unstructured data in this arena.
According to the article, the need to sift through the available data to find what is relevant and create an end-to-end solution is the ultimate goal. We learn:
“Ollie Ross, head of research at the Corporate IT Forum, notes a convergence of business intelligence and enterprise search interests among members of the blue chip user group, at least to the extent of the holding of a member-driven ‘Enterprise Search as a Business Intelligence Tool’ workshop in December 2011. Ollie Ross said that when enterprise search was first broached inside the forum, some two years ago, it was intensive from some, but not general. […] But, over time, it has come to be seen as potentially a matter of business advantage, given sufficient usage.”
BI, Enterprise Search, and Big Data Analytics are three different approaches to finding information. A good bet to close the deal would include working with a full-service solution like Intrafind that can meet your enterprise needs and even help guide you through the maze of options.
Andrea Hayden, November 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
OwnCloud Expands with Focus on on Deployment
November 29, 2012
An impressive showing in second seed round funding–$2.5 million to be exact–was reported by open source file sync and share software company OwnCloud Inc. According to the TechCrunch article titled, “On-Premise Cloud Storage/Sharing Startup, OwnCloud, Closes $2.5M Second Seed Round, Led By General Catalyst Partners,” the round was led by investor General Catalyst Partners as well as new investors.
The Boston-based startup plans to use the money for continued expansion in its enterprise and education customer base as well as support service providers. The article shares:
“‘We’ve been excited about ownCloud since its infancy, and after watching everything they’ve accomplished in a very short time, it validated our belief that they’d developed an exceptional team with an exceptional product,’ said [General Catalyst Managing Director] Bohn in a statement. ‘There’s no one in this increasingly crowded market that can do the things ownCloud does – integrate closely with existing IT, innovate at lightning speed and offer choice of storage locations. With those capabilities already in place differentiating it from the competition, we’re confident that ownCloud will succeed.’”
Serving specific industries and sectors is a great niche for companies concentrating on transformation from storage to deployment. Trusting a solution such as Intrafind, based upon well-formed technology to deploy enterprise solutions that fit the organization, may be a wiser choice in some sectors such as finance and pharmaceuticals.
Andrea Hayden, November 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Intrafind Knowledge Map Increases Overall Efficiency with a Quick Click
November 28, 2012
Network infrastructures, social media, mobile and the cloud continue to bring changes in daily business operations. Transformational technologies like these can provide the key elements necessary to stay competitive but success relies heavily on their ability to evolve within the enterprise.
The right strategy can bring prosperity through evolution to any industry. ZDNet’s article “CIOs unplugged: Straight Talk from Innovators” talks about some solid strategies to consider in order to increase operational efficiency when utilizing transformational technologies:
“Operational efficiency and cost reduction are always part of the IT mandate, so the discussion touched there. These CIOs distinguish themselves precisely because their key focus is innovation, rather than cost reduction. Many organizations primarily expect the CIO (and IT) to drive efficiency and cost savings, rather than participate in planning important strategic decisions. This view devalues IT, and is intensely shortsighted, because most industries today rely on technology to create strategic advantage.”
Innovative CIOs may find themselves more capable of driving change if their users are able to find the enterprise knowledge they need when they need it. Solutions such as Intrafind’s Knowledge Map allows for better use of enterprise knowledge assets and leaves more time for organizational innovation. Overall efficiency is increased with a user friendly interface which centralizes relevant company metadata in a 360 view for access with a few quick mouse clicks.
Jennifer Shockley, November 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
PolySpot Speaks More Than 50 Languages
November 27, 2012
Due to the ever increasingly globalized workforce, it is more important than ever that data analytics providers are able to appeal to a multitude of countries and languages and corner the polyglot market. Matthew Aslett of the Too Much Information blog recently reported on this topic in the article, “The Dawn of Polyglot Analytics.”
According to Aslett, the emergence of a polyglot analytics platform exemplifies a new approach to data analytics that is based on the user’s approach to analytics rather than the nature of the data.
The article states:
Polyglot analytics explains why we are seeing adoption of Hadoop and MapReduce as a complement to existing data warehousing deployments. It explains, for example, why a company like LinkedIn might adopt Hadoop for its People You May Know feature while retaining its investment in Aster Data for other analytic use cases. Polyglot analytics also explains why a company like eBay would retain its Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse for storing and analyzing traditional transactional and customer data, as well as adopting Hadoop for storing and analyzing clickstream, user behaviour and other un/semi-structured data, while also adopting an exploratory analytic platform based on Teradata’s Extreme Data Appliance for extreme analytics on a combination of transaction and user behaviour data pulled from both its EDW and Hadoop deployments.
One company that is currently excelling in polyglot analytics is Polyspot. In the recent blog post, “Polyspot is Polyglot” we learned that Polyspot offers its services in over 50 languages. Language is no longer a hindrance to data management success. PolySpot warrants a close look. The company offers high value technology within the reach of most organizations’ budgets.
Jasmine Ashton, November 27, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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