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
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
Gartner Breaks New Marketing Turf
April 11, 2011
Gartner has a thriving practice in everything to do with digital information. The publicly traded company seems to be sending a message that I hear as “we’re desperate”. Maybe I am wrong but spam from IDG (another researchy-type outfit) that has the subject “Gartner Insight, 3 Top Papers + Win an iPad 2” does not evoke the wood paneled methods of McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, or Bain (yep, the Bain with the now apocryphal kumbaya sessions at a Holiday Inn on Route 128). As wacky as the blue chip consulting firms are, I find email with the words “insight,” “top papers”, and “win and iPad” quite piercing cries for attention.
First, there are not “3 top papers” on offer. The count seems closer to four, but at my age my eyesight is failing. See for yourself whether I got the number four correct:
The other signals that reached me via spam email was the big button that said “Register Now.”
The angle, of course, is leads and input into how Gartner can improve. I also found this enjoinder fascinating:
I will definitely forward the spam message to my one friend, a 70 year old with a beat up truck and a limp.
One positive note: Gartner and IDG got a free mention in a free blog which contains information for which one does not have to register, enjoin a friend, or miscount to access. Of course, the quality of information in Beyond Search is miserable, but we don’t even spam. Heck, we don’t follow up on proposals, return phone calls, or attend conferences where “pay to play” is the new business model.
Objectivity is what one thinks it is, right? And what about search? No white papers about enterprise search? No quadrant? Sigh.
Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2011
Freebie but no drawing to win an iPad. How is that drawing conducted by the way?
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
Does Google Get an Edge by Hiring a Java Babydaddy?
April 2, 2011
Some background. Sun “invented” Java. Oracle bought Sun. Oracle entered into the American legal process to assert its rights over Java. Forget the open source stuff. This is Oracle and the alleged miscreant, Google.
The IT sporting arena has seen some hefty competition this year. The rivalry between Oracle and Google heated up over an infringement suit, but according to “Google Hires Java Founder James Gosling amid Oracle Infringement Suit” things are about to get nasty or more interesting depending upon one’s point of view.
Google has been less than happy that Oracle is suing them over a Java-related patent infringement. The search mogul decided to rub static electricity over the wounded relationship by hiring James Gosling, Java founder, and former VP of Sun Microsystems. Engadget opines:
When Oracle acquired Sun last year, Gosling, who refused to take part, wasn’t shy about expressing his views, calling Oracle’s Larry Ellison “Larry, Prince of Darkness.” On a post to his blog, which has since crashed, Gosling was vague about his new duties saying simply, “I don’t know what I’ll be working on. I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon.
Gosling may be unsure of what job awaits him at Google, but one thing is certain: Larry Ellison is not happy about the sudden change in teams. The Java babydaddy phase of the Google – Oracle dust up is underway.
Whitney Grace, April 2, 2011
Freebie like most things in life except Google enterprise services and Oracle database software
Digital Reasoning and Cloudera: A Prescient Partnership
April 1, 2011
We learned via Marketwire that “Cloudera and Digital Reasoning Partner to Provide Complex Data Analytics for Government Intelligence and Enterprise Markets.”
Cloudera, leading distributor of open source Apache Hadoop data management solutions, and premiere data analytics provider Digital Reasoning are working together to take complex analytics to new heights. They have integrated both Hadoop (CDH3) and support for HBase into Synthesys, Digital Reasoning’s analytic software. According to the write up:
Designed as a next-generation solution for advanced analytics over both complex and structured data, Synthesys helps decision makers for large government intelligence projects and commercial enterprises make better sense of their data. Synthesys’ integration with CDH3 and HBase will provide confidence to those tasked with solving the government’s largest and most demanding data analytics challenges.
This project allows for the combination of algorithms on an unprecedented scale. The CDH3 version of Apache Hadoop is easy to install and integrate. Also,the support of HBase places Digital Reasoning at the forefront of large-scale text analytics in cloud deployments.
The joint effort may have the additional benefit of pushing U.S. government entities toward adopting Hadoop, an important step toward organizations working together.
Synthesys with Apache Hadoop CDH3 and HBase: a resource greater than the sum of its parts.
Cynthia Murrell April 1, 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
Freebie
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.
IBM and Oracle: Another Corporate Scuffle
March 22, 2011
I just caught up with some in box info and read “IBM Fires Back at Oracle in Middleware Fray.” I had pigeon holed Oracle as an outfit preoccupied with legal spats with SAP and Google. Wrong. Oracle has time to needle IBM and other enterprise vendors about middleware performance. Now I think “middleware performance” like search is pretty much a fuzzy wuzzy notion. Proving speed or anything else when middleware or search is involved is little more than an exercise in sophistry.
IBM, now that its PR run with Jeopardy is history has time to take umbrage at Oracle’s hints that IBM software is like an ageing sprinter or a chubby marathoner. According to the write up:
Big Blue released new SPECjEnterprise 2010 benchmarking statistics on Friday that it said “demonstrate how businesses using IBM WebSphere middleware on Power 7 hardware can get the lowest cost for performance in the industry.” IBM also claimed that it “has proven 76 percent higher performance than Oracle overall.” In addition, IBM has launched a new website that lays into Oracle on a number of fronts. “Are you overpaying for Oracle Database? Hint. You’re overpaying for Oracle Database,” one barb reads.
Why the response? I am not sure any of the Fortune 1000 get too excited about claims from either company. Once a decision is made to go Oracle or IBM, the likelihood of a sudden shift drops off. If an option is required, I think younger information technology professionals will angle to fiddle with open source, maybe cloud solutions. Others will want to tire kick different options from start ups, but at the end of the day, dislodging either Oracle or IBM is easier said than done.
My view is that Oracle and IBM are at a point where the next customer has to come from the other company’s customer list. Will the strategy work? In my view, there will be some shifting, the financial and business pressures are such that the thrashings of these giants will be good theater, not great generators of new business.
Entertaining for me. Perhaps I am wrong, but I see in this dust up more posturing than meaningful marketing. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 22, 2011
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