Sinequa bottles up Pernod Ricard
January 26, 2012
Leading global beverage distributor and producer Pernot Ricard has selected Sinequa to handle its growing data management needs, informs “Pernod Ricard Uses Sinequa to Offer All Its Employees Unified Access to Group Information” at Minesto.
Each separate division of Pernod Ricard, and there are many, has its own intra- or extra- net, and many also have their own Web sites. The press release asserts,
Sinequa was chosen for its ability to implement a solution offering multilingual natural language search and ability to connect quickly with all sources of documents. Indexing, classification and organization of documents of any type and any size has facilitated access for users and administrators with information present in multiple intranets and extranets.
In the future, Pernod Ricard intends to integrate Sinequa tools into its business applications. Sounds like they are happy with their choice.
Pernot Ricard is a global behemoth, producing and distributing many of the top inebriants, like Absolut vodka, Glenlivet scotch whisky, Beefeater gin. . . the list goes on and on. See here for their US page.
Sinequa’s 25 years in the semantics business uniquely equips them for such large-scale projects. In fact, their world-wide customer base includes a number of huge private and public organizations. The company prides itself on crafting intuitive solutions.
Cynthia Murrell, January 26, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Proving the Value of Fast Search
January 24, 2012
A growing number of companies are specializing Fast services for large companies committed to rolling out SharePoint 2010.
Search Technologies, the largest and best established of these apparently have more than 50 trained/qualified Fast engineers. A number of these were no doubt picked up during 2011, when Microsoft let a lot of them go. That said, Search Technologies were “Fast Alliance Partner of the Year” back in 2006, a while before Microsoft took an interest in the Scandinavian technology company. Since then, they claim to have since delivered more than 40,000 consultant-days of implementation assistance. That’s a significant amount of hands-on experience.
I note that they are actively promoting a Fast for SharePoint proof of concept service.
For large organizations on the edge of a decision, this makes a lot of sense, particularly because the proof of concept aims to show how Fast works with the customer’s own data sets, in a live environment, enabling a cost-effective comparison to be made with the alternative of staying with a base SharePoint search.
Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
PolySpot Scales Ten Alps Publishing
January 24, 2012
The economic climate may be uncertain, but it is a great day for scaling Ten Alps. PolySpot announced that it closed a deal to implement its next generation, search enabled applications system for a major publisher. The PolySpot system will be deployed for the Link2Portal system.
Olivier Michel, one of PolySpot’s senior managers, told me:
Ten Alps publish more than 200 publications a year and have developed the unique Link2Portal site, to bring together the day’s news, analysis and exclusive opinions across UK and Global Trade, Logistics, construction and infrastructure, energy and sustainable development sectors. This information was previously isolated by each publication or subscriber list and as the volume of data was both growing rapidly, and becoming of increasing value to a widening readership, Ten Alps decided to invest in an information search and access solution to facilitate and enhance access to all of its information assets.
According to Mr. Michel, Ten Alps selected PolySpot because of its flexibility, performance, and implementation speed. The PolySpot system was up and running in three days, including integration of the PolySpot solution with other enterprise applications. PolySpot’s robust enterprise search application programming interface was a pivotal element in this implementation.
Stuart Brown, managing director of Ten Alps, said:
With its simple, open architecture, PolySpot was the only platform capable of providing us with a unique B2B search engine, which optimizes our content.
What makes this implementation significant is that PolySpot uses a range of content, including directory information from an Amazon cloud-hosted CouchDB database, the site’s editorial content (which is managed by Drupal), and the unstructured content of the thousands of publications available as PDF files and e books.
Consequently, PolySpot delivers the type of integrated search experience that some vendors have been describing but delivering only after weeks or months of effort. With PolySpot, a search on Link2Portal lets the user find news, a sector expert’s opinion, the e book for a publication, opened at the right page supported with industry solutions and suppliers information.
Gilles André, the chief executive officer of PolySpot, said:
The aim of Link2Portal is to facilitate information access for visitors to a major UK media group’s Web site. We achieved this objective in just a few days and we are proud to have Ten Alps as a customer.
Founded in 2001, PolySpot designs and sells search and information access solutions designed to improve business efficiency in an environment where data volumes are increasing at an exponential rate.
PolySpot’s solutions offer deep connectivity,so that licensees can access the data they need, regardless of their structure, format or origin. PolySpot’s solutions are based on an innovative infrastructure offering both versatility and high performance, enabling companies to make best use of their assets and rationalizing the strategic costs that today’s businesses and organizations face. PolySpot’s solutions have millions of users worldwide, across all business sectors, with customers including Allianz, BNP Paribas, Bureau Veritas, Crédit Agricole, OSEO, Schlumberger, Veolia, Trinity Mirror and Vinci.
A tip of the search enabled applications hat to the PolySpot team. Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, and IBM have a frisky competitor on their hands I surmise.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
When Services and Software Collide: Oracle in Michigan
January 24, 2012
With Hewlett Packard wanting to be “just like” IBM and Oracle, services and software can collide with interesting consequences. If you have been caught in a failed enterprise search system deployment, you may find “Oracle Demands Judge Dismiss University’s Claims over ERP Failure” meaningful. My understanding is that the software did not work for the client. The client did what unhappy clients to; that is, call the lawyers. Then the story took a fascinating turn:
In December, the school filed an amended complaint that added new allegations, including that Oracle had conducted a “rigged” demonstration of the software package at issue. Oracle’s motion this week responds to that filing, asking that its allegations of fraudulent inducement, gross negligent misrepresentation, grossly negligent performance of contractual obligations and willful anticipatory repudiation of contract be dismissed.
Oh, oh. Consultants could not make the system work because the client alleges that Oracle showed a demo. How often has this happened? Cool demo. Failed reality.
I don’t know how this legal matter will turn out, but consultants who try to implement demos may be over their heads and billing for time to convert dreams into functional software can come back and bite, hard. Clueless licensees have teeth and can be a noisy bicycle card in a software consultant’s wheel.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Enterprise Search: Cruising on the Concordia
January 19, 2012
I keep my eyes peeled for useful management examples. Whilst recovering from a minor hitch in the goose liver, I watched the drama of the Concordia cruise ship unfold. The horrific event reminded me of several enterprise search deployments I had analyzed. I was not the “captain” of these enterprise search voyages. I was able to do some post-crash analysis.
To get the basics of the event, you will want to familiarize yourself with the write up in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, “Concordia Disaster: Should a Captain Go Down with His Ship?” In my opinion, the key passage in the Daily Telegraph’s story was:
…leadership entails an obligation to be courageous – morally, physically or both. It is the price of leadership; it is why leaders are more highly regarded and rewarded than the rest of us. But even subordinates in certain professions have the duty to be brave, as the rest of us do not. A soldier is expected unquestioningly to put himself in the way of bullets as a civilian is not.
(But my favorite news item was Cruise Captain Says He ‘Tripped’ Into Lifeboat, Couldn’t Get Out.”
Not Taking Responsibility
The alleged behavior of the captain shares one similarity with enterprise search implementations that sink. The person running the operation shirks responsibility for the disaster. My view is that ego plays a part. The more important factor may be the person’s character. I have reviewed a failed search implementation and had a difficult time determining who was responsible. The procurement team has the thick linen of committee think under which to hide. The information technology manager often keeps well away from search, a behavior conditioned by knowledge that making information findable is often impossible. The chief financial officer just counts the dissipated dollars. Accountants are not implementers. The person charged with the failure is often a young engineer whom those ultimately responsible deem expendable.
The first similarity is that in big disasters those who are responsible do whatever is needed to avoid responsibility. In enterprise search, there is a ship captain. Pretending that a captain does not exist is one interesting characteristic of today’s organizational life. Think Jerry Yang at Yahoo. Recall Leo Apotheker. You get the idea. What about the search system at your company? The National Archives? Amazon’s online store? There are captains responsible. Unfortunately these captains do not get global news coverage for their behavior.
Show Boating
The crash and sinking was a consequence of show boating. The idea is that doing something fancy is appropriate and within the perimeter of the job description is allowed. In enterprise search, the show boating becomes visible when one or more people make suggestions along these lines:
- We need to deliver answer to users, not laundry lists
- Natural language processing is essential to the success of our search system
- We need a taxonomy and semantic technology to make information accessible
- Our system has to work just like Google.
Each of these is similar to the Concordia’s buzz close to shore. Few of those involved in an enterprise search implementation realize how downright expensive, complicated, and resource intensive these “suggestions” become. Vendors go along to keep the contract. The deployment team is thinking about making search headlines and maybe getting a raise and a promotion. Great idea but when the effort sinks the search project, the result is a disaster.
The second similarity between the Concordia and the ill fated enterprise search system deployment is that getting cute can wreck havoc. Now you may say, “Hey, semantic methods will only help our search system.” Maybe, maybe not. My view is that show boating is one characteristic of doomed enterprise search system. The fix? Just do the basics well, then add some special sauce.
Migration Solutions for SharePoint and Office 365 Users
January 10, 2012
The New Year always brings about an avalanche of resolutions, some reasonable and some completely unattainable, as people strive to become a better, slimmer, more productive, smarter, funnier, happier, and/or healthier selves.
Maybe your New Year’s goals are to cut back on coffee, quit smoking, save more money, lose weight, or be better organized? Or maybe your resolution is to figure out a solution for converting those pesky Google Docs to your fancy new enterprise system. If the latter is the case, then Google-users have one more reason to celebrate in 2012, as MetaVis Technologies recently announced in “MetaVis Now Offers Google to SharePoint Migration” that they have created a solution that allows Microsoft SharePoint or Office 365 users to migrate their Google Apps and Google Docs.
According to the MetaVis announcement:
“MetaVis Migrator for Google Apps [http://www.metavistech.com/product/metavis-migrator-google-apps] allows customers to migrate Google content to either a hosted or on-premise-based SharePoint solution while preserving valuable metadata required for compliance and governance policies….With the MetaVis Migrator product line up, customers can migrate content from multiple sources including SharePoint 2010, 2007, 2003, file shares, Exchange Public Folders, Outlook Folders and now Google.”
We know that SharePoint has become the magnet for third-party enhancements. With more than 100 million SharePoint licenses deployed, the demand for SharePoint functionality is rising sharply. Growth in SharePoint was robust in 2011, and 2012 may be another banner year for Microsoft’s most popular enterprise solution.
At Search Technologies, we put the customer first. If a solution requires a third-party component such as MataVis’ or original programming, our engineers have the deep technical know how and engineering expertise to make next-generation information access a reality. To learn more about Search Technologies, point your browser at http://www.searchtechnologies.com.
Iain Fletcher, January 12, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Perfection in the Details: Enterprise Search Solutions with SharePoint IVP
January 5, 2012
Today we want to focus on a company that offers a great enterprise search solution, one that can stand alone or work alongside the more common SharePoint infrastructure. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is operated out of Austria. Having won the KM World Trendsetting Product of the Year four years in a row, Fabasoft is now getting positive attention from Gartner and its MarketScope Report.
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise Winter 2012 Release is now available for download.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is built on 3 pillars: Simplicity, speed, efficiency. The Fabasoft Mindbreeze 2012 Winter Release stands under the motto ‘quicker to the point.’ Perfection is the sum of the details.
Check out the short and helpful YouTube tutorial videos embedded in the page. Each demonstrates a new feature added to the Winter 2012 Release. One particularly useful feature, especially for those already invested in a SharePoint installation, is the additional efficiency added to the SharePoint connector feature.
A survey by German market analysts has shown that practically every second company uses SharePoint. However, in SharePoint only one facet of a company’s knowledge can be presented. The Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise 2012 Winter Release puts an end to this shortcoming.
The video tutorial for this new SharePoint feature shows how easy it is to retrieve search results from every facet of an organization’s network, not just the SharePoint infrastructure. Results are not only efficiently retrieved, but sorted and classified. Retrieve an email address? Just click on the address for immediate embedded usability, unlike many other enterprise solutions that only retrieve. No more cut and paste.
Updates such as this one are rolled out monthly for the cloud and quarterly for enterprise customers. Updates are seamless and require no additional customization. If your organization is seeking an intuitive enterprise search solution, Fabasoft Mindbreeze is worth your attention.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SAP: Long and Winding Road for Search
January 5, 2012
In one of the early editions of the Enterprise Search Report, that white elephant of 600 pages containing profiles of more than two dozen vendors, I described TREX, a nifty algorithm for Text Retrieval and Information Extraction. (The link is to the Wikipedia write up, however.) For those of you who are new to search, TREX is not the creature you wished you had as a pet when you were eight years old. The SAP TREX is a natural language processing search and retrieval system which was mostly home grown. Keep in mind that TREX owns the Inxight entity extraction and server technology developed by the adepts at Xerox PARC. I interviewed one of the developers, profiled the system’s approach to content processing, and pointed out that search was a killer in the SAP R/3 environment for three reasons:
- SAP assigns its own spiffy metadata to content objects, storing these in the wild and wonder proprietary R/3 environment
- SAP systems took and probably still take a long time to plan, implement, and impose on the client. My understanding is that the client does not tell SAP how the clients like to work. SAP tells the client how the client will work with the SAP system and method. Nifty for sure.
- SAP systems have struggled with a wide range of performance “opportunities.” The idea is that when something goes slowly, then the client has the “opportunity” to make changes which will speed up the large, IBM-inspired system.
A few years ago, before Endeca became the new billion dollar toy at Oracle, Endeca accepted cash infusions from outfits hooked up with Intel (yep, the company with the vision that its chips could crush any computational problem because they were so darned fast) and SAP’s investment unit (an outfit allegedly looking at ways to give SAP a leg up on the future). After watching Endeca do its recursive indexing and faceting processes, Intel and SAP shifted gears. Endeca, as you know, is now part of Oracle along with TripleHop (clustering and indexing), InQuira (natural language processing from two predecessor companies), and RightNow (also infused with search technology), Artificial Linguistics, PL/SQL’s wonky command driven search, and probably some technologies I either don’t know about or have forgotten due to advancing senility.
Will SAP slip and fall with its information retrieval solutions? A happy quack to the image source http://personalinjuryclaims1.co.uk/fall-claims/
When you want to run search within an SAP environment, many folks just embrace one of the SharePoint solutions, give TREX a go, or license a system which is compatible with some of the SAP processed content. In short, SAP’s approach to search is not much different from IBM’s or Microsoft’s.
The question to consider is, “What’s next for SAP?”
Several observations:
First, SAP has to pump money into TREX to keep the system in step with today’s information demands. With SAP dabbling in open source and focusing on higher margin products and services, TREX is probably not the long haul solution for SAP. Home grown search is too expensive.
Second, SAP continues to poke around open source software. At some point, SAP may follow in the footsteps of the company which inspired SAP in the first place—IBM. Lucene and Solr look like possible options. This is a trend to watch.
Third, SAP buys or ties up with one of the workman-like search vendors. SAP could either sign a deal to use a third party system on some basis or just buy one of the dozens of information retrieval vendors who are looking for a financial white knight. Despite the chatter about search, many search and retrieval companies are gasping for oxygen. SAP may have a tank and a breathing mask.
What’s my view? Well, since I am a mercenary goose, I don’t have an official opinion. I do find it fascinating that SAP has not moved aggressively to the Lucene Solr solution. So for now, I am going out of town and will wait until my Overflight service provides some solid data about SAP’s next move.
Hopefully it will be more artfully crafted than SAP’s pricing and customer service activities in the last two or three years.
January 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Creative Tip to Avoid Indexing in SharePoint Fast
January 4, 2012
At his Tech and Me blog, Mikael Svenson provides a unique search tip in “How to Prevent an Item from Being Indexed with FAST for SharePoint.” Keeping an item from being indexed in FAST using the meta data or text of a file has long been considered next to impossible. Svenson, however, has found a way, and that way is through profanity. Yes, you can use the Offensive Content Filter to your advantage. The article explains:
The thing about the offensive content filter is that it will prevent documents from being indexed if they contain a certain about of bad language. If you get embarrassed by such words, then skip reading 🙂 “So now we have a stage which can drop items, the rest is to assign enough bad words to ‘ocfcontribution’ to get above the threshold it triggers on.
See the write up for a detailed description of how to implement this creative approach.
Svenson notes one important caveat: if you have any documents containing profanity that you actually want to have indexed, this solution may backfire. Avoid difficulties by tapping the deep search expertise of Search Technologies.
Iain Fletcher, January 4, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Kapow Releases Katalyst Version 8.2
January 2, 2012
Kapow Software moves in a new direction that is a bit of a surprise to us. EWeek reports, “Kapow Software Punches Out Update of Cloud-Based Analytics Service.” Kapow is positioning its Katalyst version 8.2 as a self-service, subscription model analytics tool with an intuitive user interface. It also boasts 100% data accuracy. According to the write up:
Katalyst 8.2 can organize, integrate and analyze data from streams as diverse as legacy, on-premise, social media, partner, B2B, competitor, e-commerce, blogs and news sites, as well as location-based and mobile data, [founder Stefan] Andreasen said. The Kapow service is one that speaks to both IT and line-of-business people at an enterprise, and thus can bring them together (when they most often work separately) to solve common research needs.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, Kapow Software has offered innovative technology solutions for a decade. The company prides itself on bridging the divide between IT departments and business users. It now has over 500 customers worldwide but its heart remains in Copenhagen. Take your conceptual umbrella we suggest.
Cynthia Murrell, January 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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