Protected: MadCap and MadPak
March 30, 2011
Antidot Funding
March 26, 2011
We learned in ITespresso.fr’s story “Antidot Raises Funds to Help Its Development.” (If you don’t read French, you’ll need to run this through a translator like Google’s free service.)
Antidot’s Finder Suite has been, according to the article, at the forefront of semantic web technologies. Now, Antidot wants to develop search engine-specific versions of their software. The company’s appeal to investors is not unusual, but they are hardly struggling. According to the company, the firm in 2009, experienced a 34 percent increase in revenue. The article said:
“ ‘In seven years, Antidot has multiplied its turnover 30 times and created 40 jobs, taking a strong position in a highly competitive market. Antidot has been profitable for seven years and we have the means to finance our development,’ explains Fabrice Lacroix, President and founder of Antidot.”
However, the company feels that this fund-raising is important to their growth at this time. There has been management change at Polyspot and Sinequa. Kartoo, another French search vendor, has gone dark. Antidot is not as well known as Exalead, which was acquired by the French technology and services firm Dassault in 2010. What will Antidot’s engineers develop? We will monitor the innovations.
Cynthia Murrell March 26, 2011
OpenText Joins Semantic Web Race
March 25, 2011
Nstein, the Quebec based content administration merchant recently acquired by Open Text, announced the release of a new version of the popular Semantic Navigation software. In a notice on the company’s blog, “Open Text Semantic Navigation Now Available.” The write up presented a lengthy laundry list of features and functions.
Boiling the article down to a sentence or two proved difficult. We believe that OpenText now offers a crawling and indexing system that supports faceted navigation. But there is an important twist. The semantic tool has a search engine optimization and sentiment analysis component as well. The article asserts:
[A licensee can] enrich content–including huge volumes of uncategorized content–by automatically analyzing and tagging it with metadata to help discern relevant and insightful keywords, topics, summaries, and sentiments.
The list of features and functions is lengthy. There is additional information available. Public information is available at this link, but you will need an OpenText user name and password to access the content at this link.
If the product performs according to the descriptions in the source article, a number of OpenText’s competitors will be faced with significant competition.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2011
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How to for Oracle Text Search
March 25, 2011
“Using Oracle Text Search” provides some quite useful information for Oracle licensees using Oracle’s text search system. The write up provides, in our opinion, a distillation of two years of hands on work with Oracle Text Search. The write up includes a number quite useful code snippets. These are quite useful and include brief descriptions of the snippet functions. We found the script for index creation among the most useful in the write up. There is a ready-to-edit script to create an index over more than one column in an Oracle database. The author has delivered on his promised to make it easy to adjust certain search criteria, including score values for sorting. If you are an Oracle database and Text user, this is worth tucking in your “hints” folder. Good work.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2011
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Enterprise Search Vendor Web Site Traffic
March 24, 2011
I did some poking around on Compete.com. You plug in the url of a major search vendor and you get a traffic report. There’s no charge. Here’s the traffic report for the Autonomy.com Web site. The company has a high profile and revenues that match its market size. You can see that Autonomy, based on Compete.com data, is in the 10,000 to 20,000 unique range. This type of traffic is pretty good in my opinion.
If you plug in a vendor with a slightly smaller market footprint—for instance, Coveo—here’s the traffic report for that site. Compete data which are certainly not definitive reports this traffic pattern:
The Coveo Web site is pulling about 3,000 uniques over the last quarter of 2010 which appears to be an average of the up and down in the Compete data.
What happens if you search for vendors with even more lower profiles. I plugged in Dieselpoint.com (a vendor which has gone quiet in the last few months), Brainware (a paper to searchable index system) , and Vivisimo (the information optimization company). What I learned was that Vivisimo (the green line) mounted a marketing and public relations push that spiked the company into Autonomy traffic territory. But Vivisimo has dropped below 10,000 uniques.
What do I make of the Compete.com data?
First, the data are useful for broad comparisons. Most of the usage data generated by third parties has quite a margin for error. These outputs make it possible to see that a big outfit like Autonomy can be challenged when a smaller firm mounts a PR push. The problem for the smaller firm, if I understand the data in the Compete outputs, is sustaining a high level of traffic.
Second, it is pretty clear that enterprise search vendors are not in what I would call high traffic territory. My view of this is that enterprise search and the other even less well known buzzwords like customer support and eDiscovery are going to become a big part of search vendor marketing because these terms might have more magnetism. Here’s a Compete chart for Recommind (eDiscovery and enterprise search), Clearwell Systems (the outfit with the “rocket docket” phrase), and Kcura (an eDiscovery company generating some buzz now, according to one of my sources). You can see in the chart below, the spike for Clearwell, which is close to 5,000 uniques according to Compete. The other vendors are in the modest traffic range.
Third, enterprise search vendors are going to have to find a way to generate sales leads beyond a traditional Web site. My hunch is that most of the search vendors are betting that their participation in trade shows, their direct sales efforts, and their partnership relationships will produce leads and then revenue. The Web site is or has become a chunk of brochureware.
Endeca Quantifies Results Softly
March 24, 2011
Per a recent post on RFPConnect.com of the same title, Endeca Latitude Generated a ROI of 330% over Three Years According to an Independent Study conducted by Forrester Consulting. We think of Forrester as one of those mid tier consulting firms which have discovered that a blend of marketing, charm, and customers paying for objective reports helps keep the lights on.
And those are some results Forrester’s experts have unearthed!
Gathered from four companies across four different industries, nary a hint of a frown about Endeca’s business intelligence software solution.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Improved labour productivity associated with data analysis.”
- Parts and materials purchases savings.”
- Improved labour productivity associated with data discovery.”
- Engineering change orders avoided due to non-optimal part selection.”
- Cost avoided associated with user training.”
- Cost avoided associated with data preparation and report creation.”
Okay!
Endeca’s VP of product management and marketing notes that this study has successfully defined something that is typically thought of as a “soft benefit”: decision making. We think the reason why this benefit is so often considered “soft” is because it is actually kind of immeasurable.
I am an engineer, mechanical, PE, and the rest of the drill. As an engineer, I like facts, data, and verification. Disappointed in soft analyses? Well, I would not want to engineer a solution on soft data. But that’s just my conservative, non-marketing nature.
The write up reminds me of an infomercial, the as-seen-on-TV Bender Ball and the claim that the Bender Method of Core Training helps provide a workout that is up to 408 percent more effective than the standard crunch.
Really?
Don’t get us wrong, this is an amazing revelation and the results sound great, but somewhat hard to believe given the absence of verifiable data.
Sarah Rogers, March 24, 2011
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Linguamatics Takes to the Cloud
March 22, 2011
One of the leaders in enterprise text mining, Linguamatics, recently announced its newest software creation in “I2E OnDemand – Cloud (Online) Text Mining”. The company’s flagship product, I2E, is an enterprise version of NLP-based text mining software, largely implemented in the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Now Linguamatics adds I2E OnDemand to its offerings menu, matching the popular I2E capabilities with cloud computing for those companies with fewer resources stacked in their corners.
The write-up boasts:
“I2E OnDemand provides a cost-effective, accessible, high performance text mining capability to rapidly extract facts and relationships from the MEDLINE biomedical literature database, supporting business-critical decision making within your projects. MEDLINE is one of the most commonly accessed resources for research by the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.”
Of course in the event that search of additional data sources is required, it is possible to move to the enterprise version of I2E. There is a trial version for evaluation, available by request from the website. Linguamatics has been diversifying in the last 12 months. In 2009, I characterized Linguamatics as a vendor with a product tailored to the needs of the pharma and medical sectors. Now Linguamatics appears to be making moves outside of these vertical sectors.
Sarah Rogers, March 22, 2011
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Caveat Software
March 22, 2011
“Time to Rethink the Analyst Firm?” puts it to IT analysts and their clients, straight-up: Firms need to make changes in how they do business, and their clients should hold them accountable.
Author Dennis Howlett cites and expounds upon five recommendations from Zia Yusof :
Get industry-specific. Instead of developing horizontal software for the masses, analysts should develop more individualized solutions for specific industries. Yet few analysts have the courage to champion the smaller, lesser-known vendors that are filling these niches.
Rate the analysts/firms. A mechanism should be developed by which software buyers rate analysts and firms and share these ratings with other potential software buyers within a given industry.
Keep it transparent. Analysts should be upfront about how they make money, and disclose the vendors they are doing business with. If they don’t the client should ask.
Ditch the IT lingo. Analysts and vendors need to make information clear and understandable.
Go Indy. Some of the smaller, independent analyst firms are doing things the big guys can’t (or won’t). Some mentioned in the article were Constellation Research, Panorama, Computer Economics and Redmonk.
For software buyers, here are the important take-aways:
There was some useful advice tool The write up emphasizes that everyone should be aware that analysts work for vendors first and you second. What you’re hearing from the analyst may be PR from the vendor rather than objective information. We recommend that you ask questions and expect full transparency. Not everyone has an About page that explains what’s what.
We have one other tip as well: Verify whatever information you get from your analyst.
Robin Broyles, March 22, 2011
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Protected: Do You Need SharePoint Therapy?
March 22, 2011
ISYS Search Tags the Equivio Account
March 21, 2011
Equivio, a highly-rated software firm whose focus is redundant data management, has chosen ISYS Search’s’ document connectors to move information from one file form to another. Equivio will paid the ISYS Search filters with Equivio’s own series of eDiscovery tools. The full release can be viewed on the ISYS site.
The arrangement is projected to reinforce ISYS’ commanding rank as a pioneer in rooted search technologies, which offer customers the capacity to mine text from a diverse array of formats. The multinational company continues to collect both accolades and associates.
In the announcement, Equivio CEO Amir Milo states that expeditious retrieval and review of information is a primary component in the success of any business utilizing eDiscovery software.
Micheal Cory, March 21, 2011
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