Oracle Keeps Pushing into Business Intelligence
September 12, 2010
It’s like following a trail in the woods made by a Hummer. Tough to miss. Deer get the heck out of the way—usually. Smaller critters may not know what’s about to happen when the metal beastie crunches their carapace. Oracle made a big stride into the business intelligence domain with its new Oracle Business Intelligence 11g. It was officially released in August 2010 and accelerated into the tender pines dainty flowers that make up the US business intelligence market.
From the beginning Oracle BI solutions have retained some of the popular stable features from Seibel Analytics and that has not changed with 11g. the newer version does have some great features, presentation and business analysis features which are a good improvement over the previous versions. However, the real enhancements can only be appreciated by someone who has used OBIEE 10.1.3.4. Steve Callan in his The Old and New of Oracle Business Intelligence” asserted, “There may be lots of changes you can’t or won’t appreciate if you don’t know what it was like in past.”
Just like Hummers. Big, powerful, and sometimes tough to avoid.
Martin Brooke, September 12, 2010
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SAP: From Sybase to Semantics
September 11, 2010
SAP is certainly trying to convince me that the little chip off the Big Blue block has what it takes in today’s economic thunderstorm. I am interested in SAP because the company’s approach represents a model that seems to be increasingly difficult to use to make me happy. The azurini love SAP, but a goose like me? Not so much.
Now with increasing research role in the semantic web space, we find SAP surprisingly becoming a ‘gorilla’ in this realm. The Semantic Web.com article “Semantic Web Meets BI In New Project Whose Partners Include SAP, Sheffield Hallam University, Ontotext” informs about SAPs yet another venture as a R&D and managing partner of a collaborative project. It is the Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) semantic web-BI space project, initiated “to create new visual tools to help businesses make sense of tons of data.” For more about Ontotext, visit the firm’s Web site at www.ontotext.com.
As per the article, “The goal of the project is ambitious: it will develop the first framework for enriching Business Intelligence with Semantic Web technologies,” which it intends to achieve by “developing a semantic incorporated business platform dealing with large amount of data and offering interactive visualization.” SAP, which provides the bulk of the project management, has earlier been a part of the Monnet Project involved in cross-lingual business intelligence using semantic technology.
Will this semantic push be the magic for SAP and Sybase? The goose is skeptical. And whatever happened to TREX and the SAP stake in Endeca. Are not these systems equipped with some semantic sweetness?
Harleena Singh, September 11, 2010
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Autonomy Protect Receives Kudos
September 10, 2010
Autonomy Protect Legal Systems comes with solutions that help the attorneys to deliver high quality services in a timely, efficient manner. The TMCnet.com call center software featured article “Autonomy’s Meaning-Based Governance Platform Selected by Bingham McCutchen LLP” explains how, “Lawyers can now pinpoint the exact information and firm expertise needed to help their clients succeed with solutions from Autonomy.”
Bingham, a top international law firm, has been using Autonomy’s iManage WorkSite product for its content and knowledge management requirements, which provides a collaborative environment to the lawyers. “They can store all of their case matter documents and also track updates, milestones, and client communications with this product,” reports the article. Meeting the requirements of Bingham to connect to its more than 2,400 globally dispersed lawyers and users in real-time, Autonomy provides the solutions in form of iManage Universal Search (IUS), iManage Records Management, and iManage ConflictsManager. The automation provided by Autonomy increases the productivity of the Bingham lawyers.
Leena Singh, September 10, 2010
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Scaling Still an Issue?
September 9, 2010
Since scaling is still an issue to some people Lexalytics Development Blog’s post “Best Practices for Scaling Salience Engine Use” is informative and a big help on how to use Salience Engine with large volumes of content.
It is recommended that you do not create a new Salience object for each piece of content to avoid overloading. Conservatively, you can have Salience sessions once per day. Even if Salience has passed soak testing, it is still advisable to recycle these sessions occasionally.
Salience is thread safe only within a thread so you should create specific threads for a particular Salience sessions and use those sessions on the threads where they are created.
“When used for processing significant volumes of content, Salience is very CPU-intensive” so therefore, create Salience sessions only as much as you have cores. Check on http://dev.lexalytics.com/blog/?cat=1 to learn more.
Martin Brooke, September 9, 2010
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dtSearch has a New Release
September 8, 2010
dt Search Corp. announced the release of their extensions to its 64-bit developer product line. The new release covers both dtSearch’s enterprise and developer products including native 64-bit versions. For the developer products, the new release provides expanded sample code for use with Microsoft’s most recent Visual Studio version and for the enterprise products the new release updates the user interface, providing a wider selection of “look and feel” options for users. The dtSearch product line shares the same core feature set with Terabyte Indexes and File Formats and Databases also with Spider, Search Features and International Languages Support. Prices start from $199. If you want to know more about this new product you may call 1-800-IT-FINDS or visit www.dtsearch.com
Stephen E Arnold, September 8, 2010
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Are Google and IBM Disagreeing about Security?
September 3, 2010
Google and IBM have some ties; for example, the effort to get certain “big data” programming skills injected into computer science programs. However, I noted an article on ITProPortal that contained a hint of possible discord. Point your brower to “Google Not Happy with IBM Security Report.” The blog reported that Google “dismissed the security statistics cited by IT services giant IBM and has challenged the accuracy of the report.” You can see Google’s statement in “Vulnerability Trends: How Are Companies Really Doing?” In this Google blog post, Google said:
the data behind these [industry security] reports is commonly inaccurate or outdated to some degree. The truth is that maintaining an accurate and reliable database of this type of information is a significant challenge. We most recently saw this reality play out last week after the appearance of the IBM X-Force® 2010 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report. We questioned a number of surprising findings concerning Google’s vulnerability rate and response record, and after discussions with IBM, we discovered a number of errors that had important implications for the report’s conclusions. IBM worked together with us and promptly issued a correction to address the inaccuracies.
Minor ripple? Probably. Enterprise security is a key concern in organizations. With Google’s stepped up efforts in its enterprise unit, one would expect Google to take a strong stance.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2010
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Click Hunting without Crazy Business Analyses
September 2, 2010
I wrote about the shotgun marriage of a consulting firm getting a competitor to critique another firm’s products. Now I want to highlight Business Week’s essay / opinion piece “Why Companies Need Less Innovation.” The subtitle is, “Businesses need most of their workers to carry out their primary duties with enthusiasm and consistency.” Tough to argue with this generalization, right?
I am not going to argue, I just want to point out some of the thoughts I had when I read this article and discussed it with a person who works on projects with me. Keep in mind that I am not objective. I worked at the “old” Booz, Allen & Hamilton before the recent “reinvention” of the firm. The person with whom I was working this weekend is a former Fortune 50 executive and a Wharton MBA. We don’t know the author, Pat Lencioni. I assume he is a blue chip person with a better track record than the addled goose.
However, some of his ideas –not the person – struck me as wacky. Here are the that I jotted down:
First, what the heck is the neologism “creatonomy”? I can’t pronounce the word, nor can I explain it. The goose does get playful with his metaphors in a free blog, but in my “for fee columns”, I use English, skip the Greek quotes and the speed with which I crank out the posts for this digital diary.
Second, organizations in trouble think they are pretty darned innovative. My view is that most organizations in trouble don’t know the key actions to take to make the business work. Confusing doing what’s needed with repetitive activity is fatal. I think the conflation of innovation and method is a big problem.
Third, I don’t know too many leaders who are into being specific. I know that getting clear messages from senior executives is difficult and getting harder. Here’s an example. One outfit wants me to do a briefing for its board. The date is six weeks away. I am buried. I alerted the top person to the need to tell me what to do. The answer I received today? “It will take me another week to get back to me.” That’s not clarity. That’s procrastination and a failure to know the exact action to take to get the needed result.
With America’s educational system failing Americans, I think that innovation may become even more difficult going forward. As a result, the problem takes care of itself, does it not?
Stephen E Arnold, September 2, 2010
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Exclusive Interview: Charlie Hull, FLAX
September 1, 2010
Cambridge, England, has been among the leaders in the open source search sector. The firm offers the FLAX search system and offers a range of professional services for clients and those who wish to use FLAX. Mr. Hull will be one of the speakers in the upcoming Lucene Revolution Conference, and I sought his views about open source search.
Charlie Hull, FLAX
Two years ago, Mr. Hull participated in a spirited discussion about the future of enterprise search. I learned about the firm’s clients which include Cambridge University, IBuildings, and MyDeco, among others. After our “debate,” I learned that Mr. Hull worked with the Muscat team, a search system which provided access to a wide range of European content in English and other languages. Dr. Martin Porter’s Muscat system was forward looking and broke new ground in my opinion. With the surge of interest in open source search, I found his comments quite interesting. The full text of the interview appears below:
Why are you interested in open source search?
I first became interested in search over a decade ago, while working on next-generation user interfaces for a Bayesian web search tool. Search is increasingly becoming a pervasive, ubiquitous feature – but it’s still being done so badly in many cases. I want to help change that. With open source, I firmly believe we’re seeing a truly disruptive approach to the search market, and a coming of age of some excellent technologies. I’m also pretty sure that open source search can match and even surpass commercial solutions in terms of accuracy, scalability and performance. It’s an exciting time!
What is your take on the community aspect of open source search?
On the positive side, a collaborative, community-based development method can work very well and lead to stable, secure and high-performing software with excellent support. However it all depends on the ‘shape’ of the community, and the ability of those within it to work together in a constructive way – luckily the open source search engines I’m familiar with have healthy and vibrant communities.
Commercial companies are playing what I call the “open source card.” Won’t that confuse people?
There are some companies who have added a drop of open source to their largely closed source offering – for example, they might have an open source version with far fewer features as tempting bait. I think customers are cleverer than this and will usually realize what defines ‘true’ open source – the source code is available, all of it, for free.
Those who have done their research will have realized true open source can give unmatched freedom and flexibility, and will have found companies like ourselves and Lucid Imagination who can help with development and ongoing support, to give a solid commercial backing to the open source community. They’ll also find that companies like ourselves regularly contribute code we develop back to the community.
What’s your take on the Oracle Google Java legal matter with regards to open source search?
Well, the Lucene engine is of course based on Java, but I can’t see any great risk to Lucene from this spat between Oracle and Google, which seems mainly to be about Oracle wanting a slice of Google’s Android operating system. I suspect that (as ever) the only real benefactors will be the lawyers…
What are the primary benefits of using open source search?
Freedom is the key one – freedom to choose how your search project is built, how it works and its future. Flexibility is important, as every project will need some amount of customization. The lack of ongoing license fees is an important economic consideration, although open source shouldn’t be seen as a ‘cheap and basic’ solution – these are solid, scalable and high performing technologies based on decades of experience. They’re mature and ready for action as well – we have implemented complete search solutions for our customers, scaling to millions of documents, in a matter of days.
When someone asks you why you don’t use a commercial search solution, what do you tell them?
The key tasks for any search solution are indexing the original data, providing search results and providing management tools. All of these will require custom development work in most cases, even with a closed source technology. So why pay license fees on top? The other thing to remember is anything could happen to the closed source technology – it could be bought up by another company, stuck on a shelf and you could be forced to ‘upgrade’ to something else, or a vital feature or supported platform could be discontinued…there’s too much risk. With open source you get the code, forever, to do what you want with. You can either develop it yourself, or engage experts like us to help.
What about integration? That’s a killer for many vendors in my experience.
Why so? Integrating search engines is what we do at Flax day-to-day – and since we’ve chosen highly flexible and adaptable open source technology, we can do this in a fraction of the time and cost. We don’t dictate to our customers how their systems will have to adapt to our search solution – we make our technology work for them. Whatever platform, programming language or framework you’re using, we can work with it.
How do people reach you?
Via our Web site at http://www.flax.co.uk – we’re based in Cambridge, England but we have customers worldwide. We’re always happy to speak to anyone with a search-related project or problem. You’ll also find me in Boston in October of course!
Thank you.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2010
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Attensity and Its Positioning
August 31, 2010
I found it notable that Attensity, a company known for its “deep extraction” technology, authored a feature in Mashable. Mashable is a Web publication that touches the throbbing heart of the Web world and its denizens. I cannot recall a company with roots in the arcane world of content processing and the government information projects contributing a story about social branding to the pulsing Mashable readership.
But the story appeared. You will want to read “7 Steps to Measuring Your Brand’s Social Media Health”. Like Lexalytics and Vivisimo, Attensity has been working overtime to develop a product and service line up that would generate healthy revenue and deliver a stakeholder pleasing profit. Attensity’s positioning seems to be expanding to embrace the world of processing social media to determine if a company is hot or not, provide insight about opinion upticks and downticks, and other “metrics” that are useful to sales, marketing, and azurini.
Here’s the passage I found quite interesting:
Social media is very easily measured with various indicators like share of voice, reach, retweets, and comments. However, measuring without a clear objective in mind won’t bring you closer to success. Nowadays, its not enough to have and execute a social media policy. You need to be able to gauge its success, measure it, and see that it remains healthy and vibrant.
The “easily” through me for a moment as did the reference to a previous Mashable story. I think I understand the message, but I am not sure how “easy” the methods for determine social health are. What’s easy is providing the client with a report without any of the details about what’s going on under the hood. If Attensity can package “a social health monitoring service,” then the company could steal customers from Lexalytics and other companies chasing the ad sales and marketing sectors.
My thoughts on the positioning followed a slightly different line.
First, Attensity’s no cash merger with German firms and its push into social media reminded me how much the market for next generation content processing has changed in the last 36 months. The US government funds that spawned many content processing companies may be tapering off. This means that companies with the type of technology that makes Department of Defense professionals salivate has to be repurposed to new markets. Is this what Attensity is doing?
Second, the positioning and verbiage used to make the firm’s technology outputs “easy” remind me that the new markets want vastly simplified value propositions. “Easy” can generate new sales, and I know that “easy” rings the chimes of consulting firms who are abandoning the traditional information retrieval sector like rats leaving a sinking ship. I expect to see a flurry of consulting reports that describe these new, “easy” products and services. I don’t think the methods are easy, but I want Attensity and similar firms to thrive. “Easy”? Never.
Finally, the vocabulary in this Mashable write up and on the Attensity Web site follow the approach taken by Vivisimo. These former search and content processing vendors are like leopards who have pulled off a genetic trick. The spots are gone, replaced by language and services that sound more like companies that are in the research and integration business. Little wonder Garnter folded its search quadrant tent. I think more search and content processing companies will try to pull off this leopard-changing-its-spots trick.
Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 31, 2010
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Autonomy IDOL and Liquid Office
August 26, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to the video “Autonomy IDOL Indexer for Liquid Office” provides a useful look at Autonomy’s configuration interface. The graphical approach makes the set up mostly a matter of filling in the blanks. The video focuses on Liquid Office, a business process management software from Cardiff. In four minutes you get a look at the steps necessary to index static and dynamic content into Autonomy IDOL. With more than 20,000 customers, Autonomy has a big footprint in the search and content processing market. Using the method presented in the video, users to easily export content/data into IDOL. The graphical interface supports $Field(x) or $Attribute(x) substitution syntax to fetch the dynamic value of Form Field or Process Attribute at run time. For more information, visit the Autonomy Web site.
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2010
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