Marketer Links Open Source and Autonomy for Shock and SEO
August 25, 2010
I saw a link that someone sent me from a post on LinkedIn. I have a person pay attention to LinkedIn for me because I am not particularly social nor am I interested in looking for a “real” job. The write up pointed me to a blog post called “What Exactly is IDOL, Anyway?” The blog post is “real”; that is, part of the new positioning from the Silver Spring based content management information service called CMSWatch. You can read the original post “What Exactly is IDOL, Anyway?” and decide if my observations are on track or off track.
Interestingly, the write up cites an open source search vendor’s definition of Autonomy IDOL. I think the snippet is okay, but the snippet comes from a firm that is looking at commercial services in a particular way. There is nothing wrong with the viewpoint, but I think it is often useful to acknowledge that there are other angles from which to examine a technology or a company. For example, I think that a link to Lucid Imagination would have been helpful, but, hey, that’s my opinion. I am beavering away on the open source search conference, The Lucene Revolution, and I know how challenging it is to maintain a balance between the community-centric model and the commercial model. I have tried to create an endnote session that allows both commercial vendors and open source supporters an opportunity to discuss the market as open source becomes more of a force. On the panel are open source experts, the president of a commercial search vendor who used to run an open source company, and a UK-based open source vendor’s president. I hope to make the endnote an engaging, interactive discussion about this very issue: open source search and commercial search.
What caught my attention, however, is the consulting firm’s use of an open source vendor to help pitch a new, for-fee study about search and information access. This is a marketing technique that I wanted to document in my Web log.
Is the method clever?
On one hand, the notion of using an open source vendor to describe one of the best known, most widely used company’s products stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know too much about open source and I probably know even less about commercial companies, but I expected a description of Autonomy IDOL from [a] either Autonomy’s own Web site, [b] a person who has experience working with IDOL in one of Autonomy’s tens of thousands of installations, or [c] a competitor who has had to cope with Autonomy eyeball-to-eyeball.
On the other hand, this juxtaposition is sound search engine optimization type writing.
Here’s a passage that I found particularly interesting:
Now, there are plenty such cowboys around, and they’re perfectly happy with the software. But unfortunately, quite a few of Autonomy’s other customers weren’t quite prepared for it, and ended up unhappy with what they bought. Of course, it’s tempting to blame the vendor’s marketing and sales force for this; but that’s a bit like accusing a tiger of hunting deer. You can’t really blame them for trying.
With open source now gaining momentum, I find it amusing that a consultant is looping open source into a discussion of Autonomy. My hunch is that this type of blog post is a way to get traffic to a Web site and probably make sales of a study about a market sector that is no longer “about” search and information access.
Search has moved on. Information access has changed. The enterprise is a vastly different place from what it was when I wrote the first three editions of “The Enterprise Search Report.” The top five vendors have undergone considerable change. Convera is history. Fast Search & Transfer is a SharePoint component.
Most traditional search vendors struggle to get Web traffic. In my opinion, many consultants are concerned first about generating revenue for themselves and secondarily about helping organizations cope with the business issues tied to digital information. I learned the other day that one of the second tier consulting firms has pulled the plug on its somewhat crazy “map” of enterprise search vendors. This consultant’s efforts reminded me of a knock off of Boston Consulting Group’s work, but maybe I am just confused. Why did the second tier vendor’s map of enterprise search get nuked? The map did not make sense and did not yield what consulting firms need to keep the ship in shape.
My observations are:
- Hooking open source into commercial content processing is an important analytic task and one that warrants additional research and study. The world will no longer be one color. Think Joseph’s Technicolor dream coat.
- The sources of information for such a study are the companies’ own documentation, individuals with hands on experience using the companies’ systems, and observations from clients. Comments from competitors about another company’s products are interesting, but not the “meat and potatoes” which I seek. The “hands on” part is particularly important because technical expertise is needed, not the blathering of the azurini. Sponsored research is lucrative, but I wonder about its objectivity. Most “white papers” are printed on sheets of paper of different colors.
- Marketing presented as “real” information is fine. Weaponized information is something I know a bit about. If one wants to use information to put digital bullets into another company, no problem from me. But more than blanks are needed. Fluffy marketing and odd juxtapositions are digital misfires in my opinion, contributing to the confusion about search and content processing.
To wrap up, the economic pressure on publishing and search vendors is going to go up in the period between September 1, 2010, and March 31, 2011. In this period, I anticipate many interesting marketing methods, new products and services from the azurini, and even greater churn in the search sector. You may see the search world differently. My blog documents my point of view, and the blog is free unlike some of the work from second and third tier consulting firms.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2010
Freebie. This means that no one paid me to write my thoughts into this blog. I am not even selling a report. Ads appear at the top of this blog above the masthead. I am working on a search conference for open source systems and at the same time I am working on a conference for commercial vendors. Works for me because the addled goose makes explicit what provides bread crumbs for the goslings. Irritating, right?
Exclusive Interview: Satish Gannu, Cisco Systems Inc.
August 24, 2010
I made my way to San Jose, California, to find out about Cisco Systems and its rich media initiatives. Once I located Cisco Way, the company’s influence in the heart of Silicon Valley, I knew I would be able to connect with Satish Gannu, a director of engineering in Cisco’s Media Experience and Analytics Business Unit. Mr. Gannu leads the development team responsible for Cisco Pulse, a method for harnessing the collective expertise of an organization’s workforce. The idea is to apply next generation technology to the work place in order to make it quick and easy for employees to find the people and information they need to get their work done “in an instant.”
I had heard that Mr. Gannu is exploring the impact of video proliferation in the enterprise. Rich media require industrial-strength, smart network devices and software, both business sectors in which Cisco is one of the world’s leading vendors. I met with Mr. Gannu is Cisco Building 17 Cafeteria (appropriate because Mr. Gannu has worked at Cisco for 17 years). Before tackling rich media, he served as Director of Engineering in Cisco’s Security Technology Group. I did some poking around with my Overflight intelligence system and picked up signals that he is responsible for media transcoding, a technology that can bring some vendors’ network devices to their knees. Cisco’s high performance systems handle rich media. Mr. Gannu spearheads Cisco’s search and speech-to-text activities. He is giving a spotlight presentation at the October 7-8, 2010, Lucene Revolution Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference is sponsored by Lucid Imagination.
Satish Gannu, Director of Engineering, Cisco Systems Inc.
The full text of my interview with Mr. Gannu appears below:
Thanks for taking the time to talk with me?
No problem.
I think of Cisco as a vendor of sophisticated networking and infrastructure systems and software? Why is Cisco interested in search?
We set off to do the Pulse project in order to turn people’s communications in to a mechanism for finding the right people in your company. For finding people, we asked how do people communicate what they know? People communicate what they know through documents — web page, or an email, or a Word document, or a PDF, and now, Video. Video is big for Cisco
Videos are difficult to consume or even find. The question we wanted to answer was, “Could we build a business-savvy recommendation engine. We wanted to develop a way to learn from user behavior and then recommend videos to people, not just in an organization but in other settings as well. We wanted to make videos more available for people to consume. Video is the next big thing in digital information, from You Tube coming to enterprise world. In many ways, video represents a paradigm shift. Video content takes a a lot of storage space. We think that video is also difficult to consume, difficult to find. In search, we’ve always worked from document-based view. We are now expanding the idea of a document from text to rich media. We want to make video findable, browseable, and searchable. Obviously the network infrastructure must be up to the task. So rich media is a total indexing and search challenge.
Is there a publicly-accessible source of information about Cisco’s Pulse project?
Yes. I will email you the link and you may insert it in this interview. [Click here for the Pulse information.]
No problem. Are you using open source search technology at Cisco.
Yes, we believe a lot in the wisdom of the crowds. The idea that a community and some of the best minds can work together to develop and enhance search technology is appealing to us. We also like the principle that we should not invent something that is already available.
I know you acquired Jabber. Is it open source?
Yes, in late 2008 we purchased Cisco bought the company called Jabber. The engineers had developed a presence and messaging protocol and software. Cisco is also active in the Open Social Platform.
Would you briefly describe Open Social?
Sure. “Open Social” is a platform with a set of APIs developed by a community of social networking developers and vendors to structure and expose social data over the network, at opensocial.org. We’ve adopted Open Social to expose the social data interfaces in our product for use by our customers, leveraging both the standardization and the innovation of this process to make corporate data available within organizations in a predictable, easy-to use platform.
Why are you interested in Lucene/Solr?
We talked to multiple companies, and we decided that Lucene and Solr were the best search options. As I said, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We looked at available Lucene builds. We read the books. Then we started working with Lucid. Our hands on testing actually validated the software. We learned how mature it is. The road map for things which are coming up was important to us.
What do you mean?
Well, we had some specific ideas in mind. For example, we wanted to do certain extensions on top of basic Lucene. With the road map, open source gives us an an opportunity to do our own intellectual property on the top of Lucene/Solr.
Like video?
Yes, but I don’t want to get into too much detail. Lucene for video search is different. With rich media sources we worry about how transcribe it, and then we have to get into how the system can implement relevancy and things like that.
One assumption we made is how people speak at a rate of two to three words per second. So when we were doing tagging, we could calculate the length of the transcript and size of the document.
That’s helpful. What are the primary benefits of using Lucene/Solr?
One of our particular interests is figuring out how we can make it easy for people in an organization to find a person with expertise or information in a particular field. At Cisco, then, how our systems help users find people with specific expertise is core to our product.
So open source gives us the advantage of understanding what the software is doing. Then we can build on top of those capabilities., That’s how we determine what, which one to choose for.
Does the Lucene/Solr community provide useful developments?
Yes, that’s the wisdom of the crowds. In fact, the community is one of the reasons open source is thriving. In my opinion, the community is a big positive for us. In our group, we use open social too. At Cisco, we are part of the enterprise Open Social consortium, and we play an active role in it. We also publish an open source API.
I encourage my team be active participants in that and contribute. Many at Cisco are contributing certain extensions. We have added these on top of open social. We are giving our perspective to the community from our Pulse learnings. We are doing the same type of things for for Lucene/Solr.
My view is that if useful open source code is out there, everyone can make the best utilization of it. And if a developer is using open source, there is the opportunity for making some enhancement on top of the existing code. It is possible to create your own intellectual property around open source too.
How has Lucid Imagination contributed to your success in working with Solr/Lucene?
We are not Lucene experts. We needed to know whether it’s possible, not possible, what are the caveats. The insight, which we got from consulting with Lucid Imagination helped open our eyes to the possibilities. That clinical knowledge is essential.
What have you learned about open source?
That’s a good question. Open source doesn’t always come for free. We need to keep that in mind. One can get open source software. Like other software, one needs to maintain it and keep it up to date.
Where’s Lucid fit in?
Without Lucid We would have to send an email to the community, and wait for somebody to respond. Now I ping Lucid.
Can you give me an example?
Of course. If I have 20,000 users, I can have 100 million terms in one shard. If I need to scale this to 100,000 users and put up five shards, how do I handle these shards so that each is localized? What is the method for determining relevancy of hits in a result set? I get technical input from Lucid on these types of issues.
When someone asks you why you don’t use a commercial search solution, what do you tell them?
I get this question a lot. In my opinion, the commercial search systems are often in a black box. We occasionally want to have use this type of system. In fact, we do have a couple of other related products which use commercial search technologies.
But for us, analysis of context is the core. Context is what the search is about. And when you look at the code, we realized, how we use this functionality is central to our work. How we find people is one example of what we need. We need an open system. For a central function, the code cannot be a black box. Open source meets our need.
Thank you. How can a reader contact you?
My email is sgannu at cisco dot com.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2010
Sponsored post
Google Tweaks Docs Search
August 22, 2010
I noted with interest Jason Kincaid’s TechCrunch article “Now You Can Search For Google Docs From Within Gmail (And It Catches Typos, Too)” with a “Did you mean” suggestion. You can enable “Apps Search” in the Gmail Labs tag in Settings. / Bram Moolenaar, Software Engineer, says in the Gmail Blog,
The paint is still wet and we plan to make further improvements the coming months.
So is there a reason to use this?
There is if the “Did you mean” suggestion can also pick up misspellings and typos in the content being searched and not just mistakes we make or appear to make while searching. This could have enormously significant use in picking out imperfections in PDF (portable document format) document’s ASCII generated by optical character recognition, for instance. Or, what about spotting idiosyncratic typos users make in their emails and documents but not when they search.
For the Google to learn more about what we each want when we search, it would be of interest to see how we find or don’t find stuff in our own sandbox. To each his own sandman?
Ken Toth, August 22, 2010
Will Enterprises Have an App-etite for Google Apps?
August 20, 2010
Google’s App Engine recently got updated and, like every time they move a muscle, the search giant wants you to think it’s big news. The tweaks are nice, but it’s doubtful many will notice. Information Week briefly outlined the changes in an article, “Google App Engine Gets a Tune-Up.” According to the piece, “foremost among the changes is support for multi-tenant apps. Multi-tenancy means that applications can segregate data for different customers in a unique namespace, using the Namespaces API.” Information Week suggested that this bump in ease of access was actually patterned after Google’s successful photo site, Picasa.
While not earth-shaking news, this change should put the App Engine in a better position to do battle with the gaggle of competition in the cloud application platforms market, including Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform, and Salesforce.com’s Force.com. Multi-tenancy means that the friendliness between Salesforce.com and Google may begin to cool.
Pat Roland, August 20, 2010
Freebie
Solr Glitch Reported
August 19, 2010
Short honk: Solr, the open source search system, has some glitches that the standalone installer is locked into the server, unless you open it up. Besides this, other observations reported in “Standalone Solr 9.0.1 Woes” force to conclude that the Solr installer is not as robust as Verity’s. Good news for Autonomy and a view that will make the open source search community scramble. According to the write up, Solr works fine locally, but issues crop up on a more robust server installation, where Solr gives no indication of connection, and may not report errors. Stay tuned.
Leena Singh, August 19, 2010
Is ISYS Search Software Shifting Its Focus?
August 19, 2010
There are enough economically-fostered partnerships in today’s tempestuous technology market to make Donald Trump salivate. ISYS Search Software may have found a port in the storm. In an article entitled “Sybase Extends Leadership in Advanced Analytics to Customers Around The World” ISYS announced that Sybase has selected ISYS Document Filtering System for use in its IQ text analytics server. The write up said, “ISYS is aggressively addressing needs that are not being served by competitors Oracle and Autonomy.”
So, is ISYS finding the search waters too deep? If so, partnering with Sybase could be a smart move. We’re not sure if this will level the search playing field just yet, we’re going to keep an eye on this interesting development. What’s clear is that search vendors are scrambling to squeeze revenue from a lousy economic turnip. Connector licensing is one interesting angle.
Bret Quinn, August 19, 2010
Freebie
Facebook Pages Become Customer Support Centers
August 17, 2010
Consumers are the driving force behind any successful business. Many companies are behind when it comes to their CRM (customer relationship management) and though they may have excellent products customers are unable to get the quality support they need and deserve. Issues with customer service can lead to customers jumping ship and taking their money elsewhere. Many businesses have Facebook pages aimed at consumers. Facebook is improving by “brining customer service software to businesses living inside the world’s biggest social network.” “Facebook Pages Become Customer Support Centers” provides a little insight on the new support system designed by Parature. Customers will be able to choose from several different options and find the answers they need quickly. Users will no longer be a victim of the dreaded phone tree Hades. A language processing vendor will become one of the first to use the new service. Time will tell if this customer service software is effective but sometimes talking to a real person is the best fix. We think this repurposing of Facebook has significant implications for the hapless customer support search sector.
April Holmes, August 17, 2010
Oracle Text 11g Bed Time Reading
August 13, 2010
You can get your hands on the Oracle Text 11g reference guide here. There’s plenty of useful information that makes this a valuable addition to your digital reference library.
Most interesting, perhaps, is the section entitled “What’s New in Oracle Text?” It details—you guessed it!—what they’ve added this go around.
One of the most notable additions is the new Oracle Text Manager in Oracle Enterprise Manager. This functional offering allows you to monitor and modify indexes, manage logs, figure out and fix failed operations, and rebuild indexes. Among other things. As an added bonus, the results from retrieving a list of words generates entries with the same word appearing multiple time. (There are more sophisticated ways to handle term lists to be sure.)
So do yourself a favor and check out the Oracle Text 11g reference manual. Just don’t read the entire thing and become a consultant. You may be zapped. No, make that SAP’ed if your try to sell your consulting expertise without an Oracle seal of approval.
Stephen E Arnold, August 14, 2010
Blog Battle: Big Blue versus an Azurini
August 12, 2010
I was not going to write this short item, but the battle of the blues was too enticing to ignore. First, I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. I read this story, “IBM, Gartner in Blog Tiff Over Notes Report.” The link may be dead when you read this story. Blame Yahoo, not me. The story describes a bloggy spat about Lotus Notes and a consultant’s view thereof. Now, I love Lotus Notes. At Ziff in the late 1980s, we were early adopters, and I got to know the importance of authorized engineering outfits like Kinderhook. Anyone remember that group? So Lotus Notes worked reasonably well, and it delivered functionality that was remarkable.
Over the years, IBM has continued to invest in Lotus Notes, and the system has a pretty good grip on some US government agencies and big companies. Today, Lotus Notes must deal with Microsoft SharePoint. Google wants to crush the Lotus blossom too. The fact is that none of these systems is particularly bad. Each company can make a strong case for itself and against the others. The reality is that software from big, smart outfits does not vary a great deal. Features vary but technology advances in a reasonably measured way for enterprise applications.
What’s the point of the Blog Tiff write up?
IBM seems not to be thrilled with a report from the azure chip consulting firm. Here’s a snippet from the article, and you will want to read the complete article to get the complete picture:
A Gartner report about users looking at migrating from Lotus Notes and Domino didn’t sit well with IBM’s Ed Brill, who spoke his mind in a Friday blog post. But his spin on the contents of the report is too one-sided, according to Gartner’s Tom Austin, who shot back over the weekend.
On Thursday, Gartner published a report called “Migrating off Notes/Domino e-mail may make sense in some circumstances,” saying that more Lotus customers come to Gartner for advice about moving to other e-mail systems. The report is much ado about nothing, according to Brill, director of product marketing at IBM Lotus. A headline that better describes the content of the report would be: “Migrating off Notes/Domino doesn’t make sense in most circumstances,” according to Brill’s blog post. However, that name probably wouldn’t sell as much consulting time, Brill said.
Here’s my take, and keep in mind that this is an opinion.
First, consultants love buzz. A dust up creates awareness. True, some outfits get annoyed, but the idea is that the buzz generates new leads.
Second, Big Blue does not like criticism. With $100 billion in revenue, the revenues of an azure chip consulting firm are chopped liver. Picking a fight with Big Blue allows IBM legal eagles to flap their wings. On a bad day, the eagles may want to get themselves a squirrel. Snack time. This means that the Blog Tiff could become a much bigger deal on a slow August afternoon.
Third, the folks on the sidelines like Google and Microsoft may have some fun emulating folks on the Comedy Channel. This type of casual humor may do more harm than good, however. Both Big Blue and the azure chip outfit will want it to stop. A misstep can make what is a tiny story grow to the Zeus-scale.
In short, I want to avoid this squabble and the companies involved. Back to the goose pond, gentle reader.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2010
Freebie.
The Value of Service Level Agreements: Maybe Not So Much?
August 12, 2010
Whip out your iPad and load up “Inside American Eagle Outfitter’s 8-Day Website Nightmare.” If this information is on the money, In America, back to school starts in the middle of summer. When a company selling trendy stuff to school age people, big money is at stake. Like many outfits, the top dogs are not chewing on computer chips. These outfits go with big names in the warm embrace of an American TV drama. Pretty crazy stuff for 40 minutes and then, bang, everything is okay again. Well, life does not work that way. Service Level Agreements or SLAs are not written like US couch potato snacks.
Big outfit inked deals with IBM and Oracle. Bang. Problems. Here’s the key passage in the story:
atypical and concurrent failures with IBM’s hosting servers and backup plans as well as with Oracle’s Data Guard utility program ultimately proved to be the sources of problems.
If true, will outfits like Amazon and Google pitch American Eagle? What about the old saw that big vendors can offer SLAs that mean something? As long as the “something” is ambiguous, what’s not to like? Err, the outage? The time required to get back online? What’s the value of an SLA with a big vendor? Maybe not so much?
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2010
Unlike an SLA, the write up is free, has minimal downtime, and won’t put you out on a limb.
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