Search Technologies: Makes the Google Search Appliance Sing
April 12, 2011
According our information here at Beyond Search, There are more than 35,000 Google Search Appliances in organizations worldwide. Although data are sketchy, some US government agencies have more than 50 GSAs providing search and retrieval functions. To put the number 35,000 in context, Autonomy has more than 30,000 licensees of its search system worldwide. In short, since 2002, the Google Search Appliance has moved from novelty to one of the most widely used enterprise search and retrieval systems in the world. Only public Web search systems reach more users than Google’s GSA.
In order to learn the ins and outs of the Google Search Appliance one had to put in long hours scrutinizing Google’s copious online documentation and then work through a GSA set up. Google makes a low cost appliance available, but many managers and system administrators need a fast start and insider tips for getting the most out of GSA.
Until now, combining the basics with the “need to know” information to make the Google Search Appliance sing was knowledge that simply was not available in an easy-to-digest form. Search Technologies, one of the world’s leading search consultancies and integration firms, has responded to this market need. We learned that Search Technologies will participate in a Federal Search Seminar on May 5, 2011. The location is the Google office at 1101 New York Avenue. You can get additional information at this link. You can register via the Search Technologies Web site at this link.
The program will include how to plan a sophisticated search application. The Search Technologies and Google team will discuss the most common pitfalls and how planning can mitigate these challenges. The return on investment will be discussed with particular reference to the payoffs from Google’s simplified approach to deployment and the next-generation methods for integrating disparate content into the GSA’s retrieval system. In addition, the session will dig into how to connect to multiple repositories within an organization. Running separate queries across many different enterprise and desktop systems is no longer feasible in today’s fast growth data environment. The session will also include a review of the most recent technological advances in search, including the innovations in the latest version of the GSA.
According to Search Technologies’ founder, Kamran Khan:
This session is about how to fit search into real life business issues. Technology is important, but a focus on the business problem is paramount. The presentations provide the attendee with expertise gained through implementation of the GSA in a variety of different work situations. A focus on specific business objectives makes the GSA sing.
Appliances, like toasters, are made to plug in. but the GSA benefits from being implemented with a business focus. The Search Technologies’ team has handled more than 60 GSA implementations. You can benefit from this direct knowledge in the Google Washington, DC office. Space is limited.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2011
Search Technologies
Former Autodesk Exec Takes Charge at MarkLogic
April 7, 2011
We learned via BusinessWire that “Ken Bado Joins MarkLogic as Chief Executive Officer.” We love MarkLogic, a key player in the expanding smart content and big data arenas, and we’re happy to see them place such a proven leader at the helm.
Bado led Autodesk to success as Executive Vice President of Sales & Services, with revenue increasing on his watch from $800 million to over $2.3 billion and the company’s share price increasing by over 800 percent. Few search and content processing vendors have an executive with this track record.
The article asserted:
‘MarkLogic has the foundation, the technology, and the people to be a multi-billion dollar company. In a relatively short time, the company has experienced tremendous growth and now it is my job to multiply it ten times over,’ said Bado. ‘The technology is groundbreaking, [and] the people at this company are by far some of the smartest in Silicon Valley.
Perhaps the key to Bado’s success is his focus on the people he works with. All the technology in the world won’t make up for an unmotivated, unskilled, or mismatched team. A happy quack to MarkLogic and Ken Bado good luck- we’re sure they’ll do great things together. MarkLogic has grown rapidly and it has smart money behind it. Oracle is already on notice that the MarkLogic technology leaves the more traditional RDBMS technology in the dust.
Cynthia Murrell April 7, 2011
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
Freebie
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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