Protected: Is Genesis a New SharePoint Opportunity?
April 21, 2011
Asia Technical Services
April 20, 2011
An Interview with Patrick and Jean Garez
In Hong Kong in late March 2011, I met with one of the senior officers of Asia Tech. The company’s official name is “Asia Technical Services Pte Ltd.” I learned about the company from Dassault Exalead. For eight years Asia Tech has been the partner for Exalead in Asia and has become the “go to” resource for the Dassault Systèmes team covering South Asia regarding Exalead after the acquisition. Based in Singapore, Asia Tech is hours away from Dassault clients in Thailand, China, and Viet-Nam, among other countries whose thirst for Dassault technology continues to increase. In my initial conversation with Jean Garez, the person who appears to be the heir apparent to the firm his father founded, I learned that Asia Tech is now responding to a surge of inquiries about Exalead’s search based applications.
Patrick (founder) and Jean Garez (senior manager), Asia Technology Services Pte Ltd.
Upon my return to the US, I followed up with Mr. Garez via Skype for a more lengthy discussion. On the call, Patrick Garez joined the interview. For convenience, I have merged the comments from both Garezs into one stream. The full text of that interview appears below:
What’s the history of Asia Tech?
Asia Technical Services Pte Ltd was first conceived in Hong Kong in 1974 by our founder, and my father, Patrick Garez. The original business was the marketing and after-sales support of products, engineering services and asset management solutions to the commercial aviation industry. My father was a pioneer because he was among the first to predict the growth potential of commercial aviation in the Asia Pacific region and to identify Singapore as the future hub for South East Asia and beyond.
Along the way ATS tackled some industry-specific software solutions supporting various maintenance data management, engineering processes and workflows, but it wasn’t until 2003 that ATS officially began distributing software solutions as a dedicated part of our business.
What triggered the shift?
Client demand. ATS has prided itself on responding to the needs of its clients across this region. Once we started doing work in a different area, word of mouth sent additional projects our way.
ATS focuses on finding leading edge innovative and cost effective ISV solutions from Europe and the US and offering them a platform to enter into the Asia Pacific market with a limited investment.
And your activity in search?
Same path.
In the mid-2000’s up until probably 2009, the search market in Singapore and the region was dominated by legacy platforms built with an 80’s approach key word indexing and information retrieval. There was some interest in the SPSS and SAS approach to structured data, of course.
However, in response to a client project, we came across a technologically-advanced company in Paris, France. The founder was a member of the original Digital Equipment AltaVista.com search team and making significant progress with technology that was scalable and very, very speedy. In addition, Exalead was deploying a lighter, automated semantic engine that did the thinking for the user by automatically categorizing and providing structure to unstructured data. We tapped them for our client project from then on, we knew we were going to see great things from them. We continued to follow and participate in the growth of this company from their incubation phase until its acquisition in 2010 by Dassault Systems. ATS remains its partner for the region.
Asia Tech Interview: Opportunities in the East
April 20, 2011
Short honk: If you company wants to expand its technical footprint in Asia, you will want to read the exclusive interview with Patrick and Jean Garez. Asia Technical Services Pte Ltd. provides a number of useful services to clients in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and other countries. You can read the full text of interview by clicking this link. For more information about Asia Tech, navigate to the firm’s Web site at www.asiatechserv.net.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2011
Freebie but Jean Garez bought me dinner.
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April 20, 2011
Protected: Extending SharePoint 2010 Via Rest
April 19, 2011
Netezza CEO Speaks Big Data, Not Search
April 18, 2011
Xconomy Boston recently ran an interview with a former Endeca executive. In the piece titled “Netezza Chief Talks About “Formative” PTC Days, IBM Deal History, and the Future of Big Data“, James Baum has much to discuss. We found this interesting because Endeca has been a player in moving search into business intelligence, and IBM now owns Netezza. Making the mix more interesting, IBM used Endeca technology for one of its Web sites.
The IBM purchase of Netezza late last year was valued at about $2.0 billion. Netezza had flirted with search vendors Attivio and Coveo, but the Endeca hook may alter the Netezza search landscape once again.
The former Endeca professional has, according to the article, played a role in building revenues in a number of companies. Now the Endeca executive is tackling a commercial business with some open source challenges. Mr. Baum asserted:
There’s some really interesting stuff going on with open-source analytics that has the opportunity to offset some of the dominance of the big analytics vendors. We’re seeing many customers beginning to use open-source tools like R [language for statistical computing]. There are startups around it, sort of following the Red Hat [Linux] model. There’s really interesting stuff going on in solid state—SSD [solid state drive] storage is becoming important to big data. It’s still expensive and hard to maintain, and hard to build around. But it’s a really important technology and one that you’ll see us taking advantage of. The other area in core technology that we’re seeing evolve is the use of GPUs [graphics chips] for some of the specific computational processing activities going on. There is opportunity there. Those are interesting spaces to watch.
While he is certainly knowledgeable and successful, whether or not he is a prophet as well remains to be seen. Trends, like polls and reviews of just about anything, tend to be a touch subjective. With IBM and its resources anything is possible.
Sarah Rogers, April 18, 2011
Freebie
Protected: SharePoint: Time Is Money
April 18, 2011
Autonomy Boosts the Discipline of Indexing
April 14, 2011
We found the story “Indexer Flourishes as Search Fails” quite interesting. A few days ago Autonomy, a global leader in enterprise software and “meaning based computing”, released its new service pack for WorkSite Indexer 8.5 as well as for its new Universal Search Server. While the indexer has done well and received many good reviews, the notion of a “universal server” is a difficult concept. The pre-Microsoft Fast Search & Transfer promised a number of “universal” functions. When “universal” became mired in time consuming and expensive local fixes, some vendors did a global search and replace.
The service pack touts a new Autonomy control center which simplifies the management structure of a multi server environment, improved query returns, additional control over Autonomy’s IDOL components, and an automatic restart feature in case service is snarled due a problem outside of Autonomy’s span of control during a crawl. Network latency continues to be an issue despite the marketing hoo-hah about gigabit this and gigabit that. Based on the information we have at ArnoldIT.com, thus far the service pack has been deployed with little or no trouble.
We have heard some reports that the the Universal Search Server can create some extra perspiration when one tries to deploy multiple WorkSite engines. According to the article cited above, we learned:
Autonomy has identified this as a high priority issue and expects to have a resolution out in the very near future.
Autonomy has been among the more responsive vendors of enterprise solutions. We are confident a fix may be available as you read this or in day or two. If you are an Autonomy licensee, contact your reseller or Autonomy.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2011
Freebie but maybe some day?
Protected: Lost a View? Pentalogic to the Rescue
April 13, 2011
Have Your Cake. Eat It Mashed Up
April 12, 2011
The blog Search Nuggets is all about reviewing user experience and business strategy and their latest blog “The Corporate Mashup” is no different. In the blog Marcus Johansson expounds on the need for a corporate search engine that allows users the freedom to search information and receive relevant queries in little time.
In today’s mishmash of business and technology it is important to have an understanding of user requirements as well as technical savvy, such is the case with search engines like Google. The engines are everywhere, even in your toolbars. They’re readily available for users at any time of day and have no problems communicating information between the systems. The problem arises when you put the same search engines to use behind the “corporate firewall.”
“Imagine if you had a common front-end to all those esoteric systems. A solution that lets you search everything at once, with proper tools to dig around in the result set. Even better, a solution that lets you act on the results… You find whatever you’re looking for, and you act on it immediately.”
Because of the strict social restrictions most systems don’t share information and users become bogged down with endless URL’s. that’s where Enterprise Search comes in, it creates a common thread between systems so that you can find what you need, when you need it. Sounds pretty good if you think about it, now if the corporate mash up dream could only be brought to fruition.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2011
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