Open Source Wake Up
February 28, 2011
“What’s the Deal with Open Source” gives a basic overview of what open source software is and the different ways it can be used and modified. The article repudiates the fear that open source software is lower quality:
People also often see open source endeavors as being run by a few unkempt coders in their parents’ basements on a budget of nothing, updating when they get a chance (if ever). While many open source projects are run by less than a handful of contributors, larger open source systems like the Mozilla Foundation and the several Linux distributions clearly show that the system can work on a large-scale as well.
With millions of people using open browsers like Chrome and Firefox, everyday Web users are comfortable with open source technology.
One key point is that the main advantage of open source for a user: it’s free and can be extended without getting tangled in some of the restrictions placed on proprietary software.
Our view is that open source, the notion of “free” may not be free like beer but more like free kittens. However, with competent programmers on hand, open source software can be useful for the certain organizations.
Alice Wasielewski, February 28, 2011
Freebie
Sinequa Speaks Speed
February 26, 2011
Alexander Bilger of Sinequa, a French-based business search firm, boasts, “Our engine has been tried 10 times faster than the competition.” Sinequa, “a specialist search engine for companies hungry for development, is reinforcing its presence in Germany. It intends to increase its workforce by 30%.”
Bilger pays special attention to Sinequa’s work with Credit Agricole, the largest retail banking group in France. He credits Sinequa’s success in winning the multi-million euro contract to its search engine’s superior speed, 10 times as fast as the competition. Bilger also boasts upcoming versions as being more compatible with the latest software and operating systems, including the newest cloud computing advances.
While Bilger makes claims of Sinequa’s superior performance, no evidence is provided and the firm is still a relatively small one, currently employing about 35 individuals. However, its linguistic foundations may indeed give it an edge in the multi-lingual EU.
Bilger was only recently appointed head of the company after the announcement of Jean Ferre’s departure. The two had been co-directors. We remind ourselves that many factors influence performance. Speed, like love, is difficult to define without some parameters.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 26, 2011
Freebie
Is Customer Support a Revenue Winner for Search Vendors?
February 26, 2011
In a word, “Maybe.” Basic search is now widely available at low or
InQuira has been a player in customer support for a number of years. The big dogs in customer support are outfits like RightNow, Pega, and a back pack full of off shore outfits. In the last couple of weeks, we have snagged news releases that suggest search vendors are in the customer support business.
Two firms have generated somewhat similar news releases. Coveo, based in Canada, was covered in Search CRM in a story titled “2011 Customer Service Trends: The Mobile Revolution.” The passage that caught our attention was:
The most sophisticated level of mobile enablement includes native applications, such as iPhone applications available from Apple’s App Store, which have been tested and approved by the device manufacturer. Not only do these applications offer the highest level of usability, they allow integration with other device applications. For example, Coveo’s mobile interface for the company’s Customer Information Access Solutions allows you to take action on items in a list of search returns, such as reply to an email or add a comment to a Salesforce.com incident. Like any hot technology trend, when investing in mobile enablement it is important to prioritize projects based on potential return on investment, not “cool” factor.
Okay, mobile for customer support.
Then we saw a few days later “Vivisimo Releases New Customer Experience Optimization Solution” in Destination CRM. Originally a vendor of on-the-fly clustering, Vivisimo has become a full service content processing firm specializing in “information optimization.” The passage that caught our attention was:
Vivisimo has begun to address the needs of these customer-facing professionals with the development of its Customer Experience Optimization (CXO) solution, which gives customer service representatives and account managers quick access to all the information about a customer, no matter where that information is housed and managed—inside or outside a company’s systems, and regardless of the source or type. The company’s products are a hybrid of enterprise search, text-based search, and business intelligence solutions. CXO also targets the $1.4 trillion problem of lost worker productivity fueled by employees losing time looking for information. “All content comes through a single search box,” Calderwood says, “which reduces the amount of time to find information.” CXO works with an enterprise search platform that indexes unstructured data, and a display mechanism that uses analytics to find the data. It sits on top of all the systems and applications a company can have—even hosted applications—and pulls data from them all. It can sync up with major systems from Remedy, Siebel, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and many others.
So, customer support and customer relationship management it is.
Promises are easy to make and sometimes difficult to keep. Source: http://dwellingintheword.wordpress.com/2009/12/29/172-numbers-30-and-31/
I have documented the changes that search and content processing companies have made in the last year. There have been significant executive changes at Lucid Imagination, MarkLogic, and Sinequa. Companies like Attensity and JackBe have shifted from a singular focus on serving a specific business sector to a broader commercial market. Brainware is pushing into document processing and medical information. Recommind has moved from eDiscovery into enterprise search. Palantir, the somewhat interesting visualization and analytics operation, is pushing into financial services, not just government intelligence sectors. There are numerous examples of search vendors looking for revenue love in various market sectors.
So what?
I see four factors influencing search and content processing vendors. I am putting the finishing touches on a “landscape report” in conjunction with Pandia.com about enterprise search. I dipped into the reference material for that study and noted these points:
- Repositioning is becoming a standard operating positioning for most search and content processing vendors. Even the giants like Google are trying to find ways to lash their indexing technology to words in hopes of increasing revenue. So wordsmithing is the order of the day. Do these firms have technology that will deliver on the repositioned capability? I am not sure, but I have ample evidence that plain old search is now a commodity. Search does not generate too much excitement among some organizations.
- The niches themselves that get attention—customer support, marketers interested in social content, and business intelligence—are in flux. The purpose of customer support is to reduce costs, not put me in touch with an expert who can answer my product question. The social content band wagon is speeding along, but it is unclear if “social media” is useful across a wide swath of business types. Consumer products, yes. Specialty metals, not so much.
- A “herd” mentality seems to be operating. Search vendors who once chased “one size fits all” buyers now look at niches. The problem is that some niches like eDiscovery and customer support have quite particular requirements. Consultative selling Endeca-style may be needed, but few search vendors has as many MBA types as Endeca and a handful of other firms. Engineers are not so good at MBA style tailoring, but with staff additions, the gap can be closed, just not overnight. Thus, the herd charges into a sector but there may not be enough grazing to feed everyone.
- Significant marketing forces are now at work. You have heard of Watson, I presume. When a company like IBM pushes into search and content processing with a consumer assault, other vendors have to differentiate themselves. Google and Microsoft are also marketing their corporate hearts into 150 beat per minute range. That type of noise forces smaller vendors to amp up their efforts. The result is the type of shape shifting that made the liquid metal terminator so fascinating. But that was a motion picture. Selling information retrieval is real life.
I am confident that the smaller vendors of search and content processing will be moving through a repositioning cycle. The problem for some firms is that their technology is, at the end of the day, roughly equivalent to Lucene/Solr. This means that unless higher value solutions can be delivered, an open source solution may be good enough. Simply saying that a search and retrieval system can deliver eDiscovery, customer support, business intelligence, medical fraud detection, or knowledge management may not be enough to generate needed revenue.
In fact, I think the hunt for revenue is driving the repositioning. Basic search has crumbled away as a money maker. But key word retrieval backed with some categorization is not what makes a customer support solution or one of the other “search positioning plays” work. Each of these niches has specific needs and incumbents who are going to fight back.
Enterprise search and its many variants remains a fascinating niche to monitor. There are changes afoot which are likely to make the known outfits sweat bullets in an effort to find a way to break through the revenue ceilings that seem to be imposed on many vendors of information retrieval technology. Even Google has a challenge, and it has lots of money and smart people. If Google can’t get off its one trick pony, what’s that imply for search vendors with fewer resources?
It is easy to say one has a solution. It is quite another to deliver that solution to an organization with a very real, very large, and very significant problem.
Stephen E Arnold, February 26, 2011
The Need for Granular Search
February 25, 2011
Companies that use taxonomies for their business to business (B2B) sites could be in big trouble. That is, if we can believe results of a survey conducted by e-commerce application provider Endeca.
As reported in “The Evolution of E-Commerce,” the survey showed that people who shop B2B sites now expect the same personalized experience that shoppers of B2C (business to consumer) sites expect. Neither wants to sort through generalized search results like those returned by taxonomies.
The solution? According to John Andrews with Endeca:
“Websites … need to make use of much more granular approaches to tagging content in order maximize the Web customer experience. That will require in many cases new content management systems that make managing the relationship between all those tags a lot simpler. The increased nuances of e-commerce is going to push more companies to embrace a SaaS model rather than try to build it themselves.”
We tend to agree that there are better ways of structuring an e-commerce site than using taxonomies. We also agree that it makes sense for most companies to outsource the development of a content management system rather than tackling this in-house.
We have no problem with Endeca, but we feel that some of their competitors, such as Mark Logic, should also be considered.
Companies that use taxonomies for their business to business (B2B) sites could be in big trouble. That is, if we can believe results of a survey conducted by e-commerce application provider Endeca.
As reported in “The Evolution of E-Commerce,” the survey showed that people who shop B2B sites now expect the same personalized experience that shoppers of B2C (business to consumer) sites expect. Neither wants to sort through generalized search results like those returned by taxonomies.
The solution? According to John Andrews with Endeca:
“Websites … need to make use of much more granular approaches to tagging content in order maximize the Web customer experience. That will require in many cases new content management systems that make managing the relationship between all those tags a lot simpler. The increased nuances of e-commerce is going to push more companies to embrace a SaaS model rather than try to build it themselves.”
We tend to agree that there are better ways of structuring an e-commerce site than using taxonomies. We also agree that it makes sense for most companies to outsource the development of a content management system rather than tackling this in-house.
We have no problem with Endeca, but we feel that some of their competitors, such as Mark Logic, should also be considered.
Robin Broyles, February 25, 2011
Freebie
The Evolving Lingo for Enterprise Search
February 24, 2011
We live in an era where acronyms have supplanted sentences, where grammar is abused more than drugs, alcohol and this nation’s history combined. Is it so surprising that our software struggles with the nuances of language?
One particular strain of tech that has been wrestling with the written symbols so often taken for granted is what is known as enterprise search, or by the arguably preferential moniker, behind-the-firewall search (BTFS). In an article appearing on DZ.com, thirty year knowledge management veteran Lynda Moulton shares her views on the subject of both its relevancy now and in years to come.
She begins by calling attention to the fact that within the gaggle, the prevailing attitude toward BTFS is one of dismissal despite its remaining on the table. Taking a contrarian stance, Ms. Moulton points out that the necessity of accessing and sorting data in order to accomplish tasks for personal as well as monetary gain remains a constant. She sees a field in which developers have awakened to the numerous applications of BTFS and the potential for profit. They are aware of the need for an expansion in range as well as adaptability based on an understanding of existing search platforms. The push to problem solve appears evident, most notably in the use of algorithms designed specifically to parse content.
Ms. Moulton declares that meaningful search technologies could not exist without “rich linguistically-based technologies”. In closing she remarks:
“Language complexities are challenging and even vexing. Enterprises will be finding solutions to leverage what they know only when they put human resources into play to work with the lingo of their most valuable domains”.
We are still not sure exactly what is meant when some talk about enterprise search. The confusion may be a consequence of vendors trying to turn older technology into a system for the Facebook Age.
Sarah Rogers, February 24, 2011
Freebie
Protected: Proofpoint and Clearwell Blend Their Clouds
February 24, 2011
dtSearch Dot Net
February 23, 2011
TechWhack posted a press release announcing, “Announcing New dtSearch® Product Line Release with Native .NET 4 / 64-Bit SDK.” dtSearch is a leading supplier of enterprise and developer text retrieval and file conversion software. They released version 7.66 of their product line, their star feature is the 64 bit .Net SDK for their search engine:
“The .NET 4 SDK covers the Spider API for indexing local and remote, static and dynamic web-based content, encompassing both public Internet and secure Intranet data. The .NET 4 release also has a sample application for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. And the new SDK offers performance enhancements for faceted searching involving millions of document metadata tags or database records.”
Other features include are a terabyte indexer–products can index over a terabyte of text in a single index, cloud applications–.Net 4 code to be used with the Ms Azure cloud platform, Spider–an application that adds websites to a data collection and it can cross multiple integrated software, built-in proprietary file parsers/converters–covers a wide range of file types, and over twenty-five search options/foreign language–these include federated, special forensics features, full-text, and fielded data as well as Unicode for right-to-left languages.
Whitney Grace, February 23, 2011
Lucid Works with Solr/Lucene
February 23, 2011
Lucid Imagination unveiled its enterprise search solution LucidWorks Enterprise October of last year. This platform is designed to enhance the Apache Solr/Lucene search engine experience by improving upon its operability thru the added components most missed in the open source application.
It also simplifies the GUI to make the software more approachable to the novice. The pricing structure seems to be garnering good reception, including a free downloadable version for development, test integration, demo and instructional use. There are also a several subscription packages to choose from if you require more support.
Lucid Imagination says:
“With the combination of speed, flexibility, application development depth and compelling subscription prices, LucidWorks Enterprise gives you unprecedented control over search. Smart defaults for developers and admins, innovative query parsing, application deployment and integration interfaces, security policies, faceted search navigation, more-like-this, automated user-driven results optimization, local search, and more, all combine to give your customers and users fast, high-quality search.”
I was pointed to an introduction to LucidWorks here. If you are looking for something more than a bare bones rundown, I would suggest the Lucid Imagination product page as well.
Sarah Rogers, February 23, 2011
Freebie
Protected: Taming SharePoint
February 23, 2011
Sinequa Change at the Top
February 22, 2011
Jean Ferré has stepped down from his position as Chief Executive Officer of Sinequa. Sinequa is a French-based leading vendor of enterprise search. He had been with the company since 2005. In “Good Bye Sinequa,” Ferré blogs about his decision.
He states, “I’m going through quite a change: after five exciting years managing the company, I’ve stepped down as President & CEO of Sinequa. I’m happy for the work accomplished and for the human and industrial journey it’s been.”
Ferré praises his colleagues and recalls many achievements while with Sinequa. Wanting to work for a larger organization, and in an area other than search, Ferré has yet to say specifically what his next step will be. With his success at Sinequa, many enviable positions should be available to him. Alexandre Bilger, the company’s Chief Architect Officer, has assumed control of Sinequa in Ferré’s absence.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 22, 2011
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
