Ami Software Media Monitoring Available
November 16, 2010
Ami Software has recently rolled out a media monitoring service, the Ami News Monitor. When this blog last discussed Ami in January 2009, there was some confusion over whether Ami was still in business.
That confusion was cleared up shortly after the original post, and it’s clear that Ami is still a player in search and content processing. The Web site for the Ami News Monitor gives more detail on features of this new solution, including the ability to monitor news in real time, distribute custom newsletters, and utilize a personalized dashboard. Ami says that ease-of-use was the driving factor behind the News Monitor, “allowing subject specific monitoring and analysis to be established immediately with no requirement for specialist knowledge of media or search.” This product sounds promising, especially with the glut of information available that organizations have to wade through. Low profile Ami is on our radar again. Stay tuned.
Some European vendors have a low profile in the United States. The US is a tough market, and it takes more than a Web site and a news release or two to get the money machine cranking.
Laura Amos, November 16, 2010
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Salesforce and Social
November 16, 2010
I learned a couple of months ago that Salesforce.com is adding collaborative features to its cloud services for businesses and professionals. The shift is logical. The person who alerted me to this social initiative suggested that Salesforce wanted to become the Facebook for business professionals. I am not sure I can see that playing out in the present line up of Salesforce services. But I can see how collaborative and social tools make sense for a group of professionals working for the same organization or working on on a joint project. IBM has the same idea.
When IBM released Cognos 10, they integrated Lotus Connections into their business intelligence solution to increase sharing and collaboration between users. Now Salesforce is launching a solution to compete with Lotus Connections. According to “Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Mobile Knowledge Management and Collaboration” in the new Chatter “the status of important projects and deals are automatically pushed to you” allowing users to stay in the loop. This new solution sounds promising, but can Salesforce hold out against IBM? In our opinion, the “I” in IBM doesn’t stand for innovation. IBM may have to consider acquiring or partnering with Salesforce in order to augment their current offerings and maximize their solutions for today’s needs.
Will Salesforce and IBM collide? Will IBM acquire Salesforce? Google seems to have let its love affair with Salesforce lie fallow. War or peace? We need a Tolstoy to sort out the high stakes games being played out today.
Laura Amos, November 16, 2010
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Autonomy Outflanks Rivals with Push into Healthcare
November 15, 2010
A Beyond Search Exclusive: Interview with Fernando Lucini
The news in Harrods Creek arrives a day late and a dollar short. We heard that Autonomy, the search and content processing outfit with nearly $1 billion in annual revenues and more than 20,000 customers, has rolled out a new service.
Auminence delivers a vertical solution for the global healthcare industry. Like other Autonomy’s products and services, the solution’s heart is IDOL or what Autonomy calls an “integrated data operating layer.” I think of IDOL as a platform upon which solutions are constructed. Search is one use case for IDOL, which relies on smart numerical recipes. Autonomy IDOL now dispatches problems in video search, fraud detection, big data analytics, and business intelligence.
The firm’s Auminence offering is a vertical play, and it comes at a time when the US healthcare industry is being forced to look for new methods, new systems, and new ways of handling health, medical, wellness, and administrative challenges. Timing is one of Autonomy’s core competencies. The firm’s new healthcare service is as prescient as Autonomy’s move into eDiscovery and collaborative services.
Not surprisingly, Auminence delivers actionable information. The chief architect of the system is Fernando Lucini, an engineer with deep experience in delivering systems that crack tough “big data” problems. He told me:
Think of Autonomy Auminence as a powerful point-of-care analysis dashboard, designed to help the provider make better quality, data-driven, evidence-based, diagnosis decisions. Auminence allows a healthcare professional to combine his or her personal knowledge with the wealth of knowledge that exists on the patient and their symptoms, clinical features, and related diseases – contained in the vast volumes of “human-friendly” information that make up healthcare data.
The user does not require training to use the system. Instead of a laundry list Google-style, Autonomy presents the information in a dashboard and report format. Mr. Lucini said, “We want to reduce the time and cost of tapping into the needed information. We want to help a person rushing to solve a medical problem to maybe save a life. Who wants to work through a list of links. That’s more work. We want to provide answers. Fast.”
Another innovation is Autonomy’s implementation of the service in the cloud. Since the firm acquired Zantaz, Autonomy been advancing its cloud-based services and features at a steady pace. However, what struck me as particularly important was Mr. Lucini’s statement that the service, which is available now (November 15, 2010) supports mobile devices like the Apple iPad and Android phones and tablets.
You can read the full text of the exclusive interview with Mr. Lucini in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak collection at this link. One thing is certain: other vendors will have to react and quickly to Autonomy’s well-timed move in the health vertical. For more information about this service, navigate to www.autonomyhealth.com.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2010
Freebie, but Autonomy promised me a cup of tea when I visit the international online show in December 2010.
NoSQL Kudzu Could Threaten SQL Server
November 15, 2010
You will have to point your browser thing—social or anti-social—at “Microsoft Coaches NoSQL Options for Azure Cloud.” I think I understand the words in the write up. I just am not sure of the Azure, NoSQL, and SQL Server subtext. Azure is, I thought, SQL Server friendly.
Before you jump into the details of Microsoft’s open source friendly ecosystem, think about Kudzu. Wikipedia says here that kudzu is “a climbing, coiling, and trailing vine.” Some arborists are not to fond of kudzu. Will open source digital kudzu thrive in Azure’s cloud?
The notion of running open source on Azure strikes me as interesting. What happens if the cloud friendly effort nibbles at SQL Server license revenues? My hunch is that today’s good words are going to be triggers for Oracle-like behavior. I still can’t figure out what Oracle’s open source strategy is. I find the Java litigation an interesting tactical move, but the big picture is fuzzy.
Here’s a passage that caught my eye:
Microsoft has also started working with Membase to give Azure an in-memory key-value store component using memcached. The pair are looking for ways to tweak Membase’s supported version of memcached for Microsoft’s cloud.
The more open source data management wraps around Azure, the more interesting the situation will become.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2010
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IBM Wants an Intuitive Internet
November 12, 2010
Yep, and I want a million dollars.
In “IBM Outlines Vision of a More Intuitive Internet” the researchers at the IMB Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) have been conducting research on how to make a more ‘intuitive’ Internet. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t necessarily want an internet that can read my mind…..I’m just saying.
Researchers are trying to create a way to make the little things in life easier, for example; making reservations and paying bills by setting up automatic notifications.
The Internet will move beyond the present paradigm where people are responsible for the initiating and managing their own manual navigation of the Web, to a ‘personalized Web,’ functioning as a platform of services and resources that are dynamically and automatically configured to suit each person’s individual goals, tasks and concerns, in a way that person wants.
Please, correct me if I’m wrong but don’t we already have automatic notification and withdrawal programs? My bills were paid via automatic withdrawal this week…..so why do I need the internet to do it for me?
They want the Internet to work for people not vice versa….Well, in my book it already does, it’s called an iPhone. You can pay bills AND make reservations at your favorite dining locale. For an example of an intuitive Web site, navigate to www.ibm.com. Now try to find the FRU for a NetFinity 5500 case fan.
Leslie Radcliff, November 12, 2010
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Oracle Search Still Not Working
November 11, 2010
I know you think that SES11g is the best darned search system in the world. Like the Microsoft offering, SES11g has some interesting characteristics and a fascinating history. With sufficient resources, SES11g can search and retrieve.
However, this article addresses a different Oracle search. Navigate to “Desperately Seeking The CEO: Oracle Said To Hire Detectives To Find Apotheker.” Discover that Oracle cannot locate HP’s Leo Apotheker. Oracle wants Mr. Apotheker in order to get him to the court room. Excitement, Oracle hopes, will ensue. SAP already admitted that it made a misstep. Mr. Apotheker’s appearance will be like whipped cream on a hot fudge confection. Hey, SAP said it had stumbled, but it was just business.
According to the write up:
HP has said that Oracle’s efforts to get Apotheker to testify are interfering with his CEO duties and has called Oracle’s actions "harassment." The dispute is souring relations between one-time allies Oracle and HP.
My thought is to stuff known information about Mr. Leo into an Oracle database. Use Oracle’s business intelligence tools to crunch the data. Query the data sets with SES22g. Look at the outputs and go fetch Mr. Apotheker. Oh, I guess this did not work. Private contractors are looking for Mr. Apotheker the way I have had to hunt for certain data in Oracle tables. Manual stuff. Expensive. Doesn’t always work either. Rats. Might make a good movie, “Where in the World Is Leo Apotheker?”
Stephen E Arnold,November 11, 2010
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HP a Marketing Marvel
November 5, 2010
I found “HP’s Move on IBM” thought provoking for two reasons. First, the news angle that HP was going to put a mixed martial art choke hold on IBM was a surprise. IBM is an acquisition-focused services firm. The goal of IBM, in my opinion, is to sell high margin services. The notion of IBM building a product that sells like an iPad is not on my radar. Even in search, IBM defaulted to open source, not its own basket of information retrieval novelties.
The second reason was the phrase “Instant-On Enterprise.” True I worked for Halliburton and a couple of other not-so-interesting companies in my career. One thing I learned during that tenure is that not too much within an established organization is instant on or off for that matter. I suppose there are some executives who want the world to work just like a Google search, but the reality is that most procurements take time. Change is resisted, often in ways that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would find exemplary. Once an engineers gets certified for some enterprise solution, that engineer thinks, “Keep job.” Once someone figures out how to run a trade show, forget the notion of learning a new trick. A trail ride horse knows where the barn, hay and water are. Ever try to get the trail ride horse to go someplace else, you—you digital Hopalong Cassidy? Yep, instant on.
Get that horse trained to do another trick, Hopalong. Stuck. Get help from Cisco.
Here’s a passage from the article that I marked as significant:
It is convincingly packaged, but comes with problematic timing. It is, HP officials have acknowledged, the product of strategic work by Mark Hurd, who was fired by HP’s board in August after some head-scratching indiscretions with a good-looking contract employee. Apotheker, a former head of enterprise software company SAP, is now ultimately responsible for the grand configuration of Hurd’s acquisition.
Okay.
I think HP can mosquito bite IBM. HP is not a predator that will keep IBM’s high margin consultants awake at night. Perhaps after Mr. Apotheker surfaces? Perhaps after the instant guy settles in at Oracle and gets a new idea? Perhaps when the HP way instantly clicks on? I keep in the back of my mind that HP once owned AltaVista.com and let those engineers drift down the river of time to the Google.
Stephen E Arnold, November 5, 2010
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IBM OmniFind Text Search Server White Paper
November 4, 2010
IBM has published “Exploring the IBM OminiFind Test Search Server.” You can, as of November 3, 2010) download a copy without charge from this link. The page on the IBM site for this publication is on the Partnerworld subsite. The white paper covers OmniFind (based on Lucene) as a system that performs “high speed linguistic text searches against DB2 text data and documents stored in rich-text formats.” This suggested to me that OmniFind can query supported files in structured and unstru8ctured formats. Structured, as I understand the term, means content residing in relational databases like IBM’s own DB2. Unstructured, as I understand the term, means information like email, standard office worker file types like Microsoft Word, and Web pages. A list of supported file types appears in the white paper, and it includes a representative sample of what OmniFind can access; for example, XML, the ever popular Lotus Freelance, JustSystems Ichitaro, and Quattro Pro. The white paper dives into specific commands that are useful to an engineer installing the system. One interesting feature is that the system makes it easier to index “external data”. Manual inspection to make sure what you want indexed is indexed is a useful best practice. The XML search discussion makes clear that the user should be comfortable looking at XML mark up. Bob and Betty in marketing are likely to find the tags off-putting. If you are interested is learning how open source search technology can be used by a proprietary company in a commercial product. The white paper is worth a read and I think it is better than the writes up from some of azurini, who have discovered revenue by selling marketing services to search vendors.
Stephen E Arnold, November 4, 2010
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Brainware jumps to Version 5.2
November 4, 2010
Short honk: My in box overflowed with a news release about Brainware’s Version 5.2 of its enterprise search system. The news release provides some publicity for a trade show at which Brainware has an exhibit. In addition to helping out the trade show outfit, Brainware called my attention to new features in Version 5.2. These include:
- More flexible security for processed documents
- Enhanced indexing of content in relational databases
- More control over what’s displayed in response to a query.
Brainware’s approach to content processing relies on trigrams for which the firm has a patent. For more information about Brainware, navigate to the firm’s Web site at www.brainware.com. No licensing fee details are available to me at this time. I did see a demo of the new system and I think the firm will give you a peek as well. I had been watching to see if Oracle would acquire Brainware. The database giant seems happy with Brainware’s content acquisition components. Oracle, however, moved in a different direction. I will keep my ear to the shoreline here at the goose pond.
Stephen E Arnold, November 4, 2010
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Inforbix Poised to Shake Up Engineering Design Search
November 3, 2010
In an exclusive interview with ArnoldIT.com, Oleg Shilovitsky, co-founder and CEO of Inforbix, provides an in-depth look at his information retrieval system for engineering and product design. His firm Inforbix has been operating in a low profile and is now beginning to attract the attention of engineering professionals struggling with conventional data management tools for parts, components, assemblies, and other engineered pieces.
Most search systems are blind to the data locked in engineering design tools and systems. For example, in a typical manufacturing company, a traditional search system would index the content on an Exchange server, email, proposals in Word files, and maybe some of the content residing in specialized systems used for accounts payable or inventory. When these items are indexed, most are displayed in a hit list like a Google results page or in a point-and-click interface with hot links to documents that may or may not be related to the user’s immediate business information need.
But what about the specific part needed for a motor assembly? How does one locate the drawing? Where are the data about the item’s mean time before failure? The semantic relationships between bits of product data data located in multiple silos are missing. The context of information related to components in a manufacturing and production process is either ignored, not indexable, or presented as a meaningless item number and a numerical value.
That’s the problem Mr. Shilovitsky and his team of engineers has solved. With basic key word retrieval now a commodity, specialized problems exist. As Mr. Shilovitsky told me, “I think maybe we have solved a problem for the first time. We make manufacturing and production related data available in context.”
In the interview conducted on November 1, 2010, Mr. Shilovitsky said:
In my view, the most valuable characteristics of future systems will be “flexibility” and “granularity”. The diversity of data in manufacturing organization is huge. You need to be flexible to be able to crack the information retrieval. On the other side, businesses are driven by values and ROI. So, to be able to have a granular solution (don’t boil the ocean) in order to address a particular business problem is a second important thing.
He added:
Our system foundation combines flexibility and granularity with a deep understanding of product data in engineering and manufacturing. One of the problems of product development is a uniqueness of organizational processes. Every organization runs their engineering and development shop differently. They are using the same tools (CAD, CAM, CAE, data management tools, or an ERP system), but the combination is unique.
To read the full text of this exclusive interview, navigate to this link. For more information about this ground-breaking approach to a tough information problem, point your browser to www.inforbix.com.
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2010
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