Denodo Is Hiring
August 11, 2010
Mash up vendor Denodo is hiring. Denodo Technologies, Inc. is looking for sales engineers in two big cities—specifically Chicago and New York. The company is one that proudly wears the azurini badge of third-party endorsement as a result of having been deemed the “cool vendor” by Gartner. Toast your résumé and fire it off before it cools.
Starting out in 1999, Denodo is no rookie. In fact, in just over a decade they assert that the company has revolutionized how corporate businesses collect their data. Competing with mashup vendors like JackBe and Kapow Technologies, Denodo seeks to amplify the value of business intelligence in two key ways:
According to Suresh Chandrasekaran, Vice President of Marketing for Denodo, “[Denodo] enables organizations to include data sources that reside outside the enterprise – particularly unstructured and external Web data – in your analysis. And compared to traditional data warehousing, the virtual data services approach is a more cost-effective and flexible way to integrate diverse data for BI and business mashups.”
In plain English, Denodo provides useful tools that reach out across the World Wide Web and grab data in all sorts of formats. It then pulls the data into one easy-to-access spot, allowing the user to synthesize the data however they see fit. It’s flexible and cost effective.
Denodo has proven a valuable asset to a wide array of corporations, from financial services to governments. The clientele strikes us as having a European flavor. But any organization can use Denodo to create new business apps based on more robust data feeds, regardless of the location or structure of the original information.
In short, Denodo Technologies, Inc. is positioning itself like a Marine Corps. drill sergeant. Will the company make good on its marketing assertions? How can it lose steam with gusts from Gartner?
So if you’re a marketing guru and know more about mashups than “it sure sounds cool,” you should do yourself a favor and go apply for the job. Of course, every other sales engineer in the world has probably applied as well, so your odds aren’t that good. But who knows—it’s worth a shot.
Chris Brantner, August 11, 2010
Iron Mountain/Stratify Get an Azurini T Shirt
August 10, 2010
“New Iron Mountain Consulting Arm Combines Records Management and eDiscovery Expertise to Help Clients Cut Information Costs and Risks” interested me. Iron Mountain, a company with lots of trucks that move paper from Point A to Point B, has jumped into consulting services. Readers of this blog know that I find the folks donning azurini T shirts an interest.
According to the news story which looked to me like a public relations-type write up:
[Iron Mountain] announced the formation of a new consulting practice, which combines the company’s long-established practice in records and information management and its electronic discovery management team. Iron Mountain Consulting advises customers around the world on how to lower the cost of managing information and records, meet complex industry regulations, prepare for eDiscovery, manage complex litigation and avoid data or IT systems disasters. By combining its deep knowledge in hardcopy records, electronic information management, litigation readiness and legal process into one consulting practice, Iron Mountain can better advise and offer customers integrated solutions for consistently managing all of their information with less cost, risk and complexity.
What will be the new pecking order at Iron Mountain? [a] Records retention, [b] software licenses, consultants who sell big jobs and want to use another firm’s solutions? Image source: http://www.tigersoft.com/TigerSoft-Practical-Psychology/T01.htm
Three observations:
- Other blue chip and azure chip consultants will have to make certain each knows something about records retention policies, archival storage, and search. Iron Mountain has lots of experience with paper and digital content. A company with “real” clients and “real” experience may win engagements that the amateurs once viewed as their Jus primae noctis.
- Iron Mountain will have to figure out how to make the human resources, travel, and bonus stuff work. There is a big difference in accounting when one sells a monthly hauling service, licenses to software systems, and brain power. In my experience, those jumping into an azure colored pool often find that upon exiting their bathing trunks are tinted in a color not too different from red ink.
- Management will have its hands full. In an outfit like Iron Mountain the technical folks have been gaining influence. Senior management at a firm like Iron Mountain is not going to be toting and iPad and attending Defcon. When a consultant nails a big job, the pecking order is going to change or the azure chip person is going to hike right on over to a “real” consulting firm. Consultants sell clients and their loyalty (such as it is) is for the client. If the client wants a solution from a third party firm, the consultant will get that best-of-breed solution and the money. The Iron Mountain folks are likely to be really annoyed to have an azure chip person sell a competitor’s product. If Iron Mountain does not deliver objective solutions to a consulting client, that’s an exciting situation to consider.
This will be interesting to watch. Stratify complements other search and retrieval technology at Iron Mountain. Will Stratify the azurini?
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2010
ZyLAB: Marketing Since 1994
August 10, 2010
A reader sent me a link to “ZyLAB Old Promotion Video from 1994.” The theme was “tides of change”, and the discipline was scanning and optical document management, character recognition, and search. One of the customers highlighted was Wang Federal. ZyLAB is still with us. Wang? I’m not so sure. Another fellow said, “Imagine carrying a CD-ROM with thousands of documents.” The video worked nautical, high speed rail, and the OJ Simpson trial into description of ZyLAB technologies.
Three points struck me:
First, with modest editing an a few image shifts, the marketing video could be used today. I am not sure what this says about the progress made in search and content processing since 1994 or about the difficulty of communicating the benefits of digital instances of information.
Second, ZyLAB, like Brainware and a handful of other companies, has an umbilical to paper documents. The 16 years between the 1994 ZyLAB video and the stack of Google patent applications piled next to my desk makes clear to me that much work needs to be done. Search, therefore, may be less important than solving more obvious problems. Search could be viewed as an add-on to a more robust set of functions. If accurate, search is no longer the main event. Maybe search is like a bag of popcorn, a commodity, a consumable?
Third, the metaphors used to communicate the nature of the problem, the value of a solution, and the benefits of that solution don’t do the job. Anyone who thinks that a system can steer an organization has not looked at the challenges petascale flows of data pose to large companies or the inconsistencies and technical problems that make a comprehensive store of an organization’s content available in digital form. Transformation can chew up an information technology budget more quickly than Tess can nibble on a dog biscuit.
Keep in mind that my comments are not directed at ZyLAB. I am including most search and content processing vendors. Not much has changed in 16 years. That was a surprise conclusion for me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 10, 2010
Sinequa Hits $13 Million in Revenues
August 9, 2010
French enterprise search and content processing vendor Sinequa revealed that its revenues for the 2009-2010 fiscal year were $12.8 million. That’s close enough to $13 million for the addled goose. According to a story in IT Director:
Sinequa announces revenues of $12.8 million for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2009. This is the seventh consecutive year that the company has been operationally profitable. 85% of revenue comes from license sales and maintenance and 15% comes from services and consulting.
The story quoted Jean Ferré, President & CEO of Sinequa as saying:
In the last months, Sinequa signed several contracts worth over a million dollars, two of which exceeded two million dollars. This increase in the size of contracts and our turnover is a result of the technological maturity of Sinequa Enterprise Search 7 in a market that is beginning to take shape. We do not only provide a technological platform, but a complete application: this is why our customers select Sinequa. All these contracts have been won after being in competitive Proof-Of-Concepts where Sinequa demonstrated its technological strength.
In late July 2010, the company revealed that it was thinking about and maybe working on context based search and rich user interfaces. The blog post by M. Ferré revealed:
Nous voila au début d’une disruption industrielle. Nous allons assister à une incroyable transformation de la façon dont les entreprises servent leurs clients et se présentent au marché. Un changement dans la manière d’aider les salariés à travailler efficacement, avec le contexte approprié et toujours en temps réel. Il me tarde d’être dans la section VIP du monde commercial et industriel: travailler dans une entreprise et n’interagir qu’avec des entreprises ou administrations qui utilisent efficacement ces technologies intelligentes. Arrêter de cliquer, scroller, naviguer, et simplement faire l’expérience agréable d’une transition évidente de mon contexte personnel vers les réponses à mes questions. Pour de vrai, cela va changer nos vies en beaucoup mieux.
The purchase of Exalead by Dassault Systems raised the stakes for other French companies in Exalead’s market space. Congratulations to the Sinequa team. Now the company needs to find a way to build its impact in markets outside of France. Maybe ArnoldIT.com’s weaponized information method will be the rosé that works?
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2010
Six Semantic Vendors Profiled
August 9, 2010
I saw in my newsreader this story: “Introducing Six Semantic Technology Vendors: Strengthening Insurance Business Initiatives with Semantic Technologies.” The write up is a table of contents or a flier for a report prepared by one of the azurini with a focus on what seems to be “life and non life insurance companies.”
For me the most interesting snippet in the advertisement was this sequence, which I have formatted to make more readable.
Attivio offers a common access platform combining unstructured and structured content [Note: one of Attivio’s founders has left the building. No details.]
Cambridge Semantics wants to help companies quickly obtain practical results [Note: more of a business intelligence type solution.]
Lexalytics has a ‘laser-focus’ on sentiment analysis. [Note: lots of search and content processing in a Microsoft centric wrapper.]
Linguamatics finds the nuggets hidden in plain sight. [Note: the real deal with a core competency in pharmaceuticals which I suppose is similar to life and non life insurance companies.]
MetaCarta identifies location references in unstructured documents in real-time. [Note: a geo tagging centric system now chased by outfits like MarkLogic, Microsoft, and lots of others]
SchemaLogic enables information to be found and shared more effectively using semantic technologies. [Note: I thought this outfit managed metatags across an enterprise. At one time, the company was focused on Microsoft technology. Today? I don’t know because when one of the founders cut out, my interest tapered off.]
The list and its accompanying prose are interesting to me for three reasons:
First, the descriptions of these firms as semantic does not map to my impression of the six firms’ technologies. I am okay with the inclusion of Cambridge Semantics and Linguamatics but I am not in sync with the azurini who plopped the other four outfits in the list. I think I can dredge up an argument to include these four firms on a content processing list, but gung-ho semantic technology. Nope.
Second, the link pointed me to a reseller of market research. The hitch in the git along for me was that the landing page did not point to the report. When I ran a query for “semantic technology vendors” I saw this message: “Sorry, no reports matching your search were found. For personal search assistance, please send us a request at contact@aarkstore.com.”
Third, the source of the report did not jump off the page at me. In short, what the heck is this document? How much does it cost? How can anyone buy it if the vendor’s search system doesn’t work and the write up on the Moso-technology.com Web site is fragmented.
I can’t recommend buying or not buying the report. Too bad.
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2010
Is Q-Go a Yugo?
August 9, 2010
Last week, I received a call from a fancy pants MBA about NLP or natural language processing. NLP seems to be a new opportunity. NLP has been around a while, and like the formerly hot notion “taxonomy” and “semantics”, NLP is in vogue. The question concerned a company I knew about, Q-Go. I dipped into my Overflight service and realized that the company had gone quiet. In some cases, “going quiet” is a prelude to either a massive investment like Palantir’s $90 million or closing up shop like Convera did earlier this year.
Q-Go provides an application aimed at redefining customers’ web searching experiences. Research indicates that a growing number of customers are sick of turning to search engines for answers because they get responses with millions of unrelated websites.
According to their website, “31 percent of users are unhappy with their online interaction with web sites and 70% are unable to find what they are looking for.” And Q-Go asserts that it has the answer for the airline, financial services, and telecommunication industries. Q-Go reduces customer service issues by providing a search application that can more successfully interpret the meaning behind user questions—in all major Western languages. The approach sounds like InQuira’s.
The result? Fewer customer service calls, lowered costs, and higher conversion rates. It almost sounds too good to be true. With a guaranteed six-month return on investment, the only downside I see is that there are still some languages Q-Go can’t work with. But I’m guessing that will eventually change if the company avoids the “quiet” state.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2010
BSB Gets Brainy with Brainware
August 8, 2010
My newsreader delivered to me this Red Orbit news release: “British Sky Broadcasting Group Adopts Brainware Distiller to A/P Automation.” [Link may go dead at any time.] “A/P” is shorthand for accounts payable. The “automation” refers to using Brainware’s content acquisition methods for manipulating accounts payable information. According to the news release:
BSkyB) has selected the company’s Brainware Distiller(TM) solution for the processing of invoices in the United Kingdom and Ireland. BSkyB will also implement the Brainware Distiller Visibility(TM) module for real-time metrics and reporting on the invoice processing cycle, as well as Brainware’s own workflow and exception handling module.
What strikes the addled goose as interesting is that the Brainware trigram method and more traditional content processing have been blended for this niche solution. Brainware, like other search and content processing companies, are working to find market solutions that need a problem solved, not a basic search solution. Does this mean search is dead? If revenues flow, nope. Brainware’s angle seems more creative than search vendors who content themselves with providing a snap in solution to SharePoint in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 8, 2010
Freebie
IBM and System Quality
August 6, 2010
I just read “Global CIO: IBM’s Bank Outage: Anatomy Of A Disaster“. Assume the inforamtion is spot on. The magnitude of the failure for IBM and its financial services customer underscores the complexity of large-scale systems. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
According to ChannelNewsAsia.com’s coverage of the press conference, IBM regional general manager Cordelia Chung said that “the personnel directly involved with this incident have been removed from direct customer support activity and disciplined” and that “IBM has taken steps to enhance the training of all related personnel on the most current procedures.” And the BusinessTimes.com.sg article quoted Chung as saying, “We have also taken steps to review installations of the same storage system at other financial institutions in Singapore for whom we provide maintenance services.”
The problem, therefore, is one of those pesky humans. In the rush to replace people, organizations may lack the expertise to make software and deliver on the promises the azurini (that is, self appointed experts) and marketing mavens flippantly assert are “no problem.”
Well, problem. The notion that giant systems will work as advertised is one that needs scrutiny. In monoculture-centric methods, a single point of failure can have significant consequences.
The azurini and the mavens will write a nice case study but it seems to me more is needed. Talking about a problem is not the same as preventing a problem. So many experts are in a hurry today. Golf and fiddling with an iPad must be more important.
Little wonder that many search and content processing systems disappoint their users.
Stephen E Arnold, August 6, 2010
Scaling with Solr, Python and Django
August 5, 2010
Scaling is tough problem. Gmail has had its share of hiccups. Reddit has recently made a switch in its search system to deal with latency. Twitter is embarking on an infrastructure project to cope with getting bigger. Toby White’s scaling tips are useful in my opinion. His Timetric Blog included a useful write up called “Scaling Search to a Million Pages with Solr, Python, and Django.” The article references a slide deck, which contains code snippets and explanatory details. You can locate an instance of the file at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1942316/SolrMillionsOfDocs.pdf. In my opinion, one of the key points in the write up in the Timetric Blog is:
On the large scale, each installation will have its own problems, but three things you’ll almost certainly need to pay attention to are:
- Decoupling reading from and writing to the index. They have very different performance characteristics (and writing presents special problems if you’re updating documents as well as adding brand new documents).
- Working out the right balance of adding/committing/optimizing data. This will be driven by the frequency with which you add data, and how soon you need to be able to serve results from newly-added data. Must it be immediate, or can you wait seconds/minutes/hours?
- Fine-tuning your tokenizers/analyzers. Although small and fiddly, this is an issue which will bite you more and more as a corpus of data grows. You’ll need to tweak your indexing algorithms away from the defaults; extracting relevant results from a pile of a million documents is much harder than from a few thousand.
You may want to check out Toby White’s Python/Solr library sunburnt. Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, August 5, 2010
4 August Ultrasaurus on Lucene/Solr
August 4, 2010
I quite like the image “ultrasaurus” evokes. A goose, in comparison, lacks oomph. Nevertheless, you will want to navigate to “Lucene/Solr Meet Up, July 28, 2010.” There are some interesting factoids in the thorough summary of the presentations and remarks.
Let me highlight four that struck me as interesting, and you can work your way through the original post to get the rest of this meetup’s flavor.
First, Salesforce.com seems to sporting a Lucene/Solr T shirt under the firm’s business casual garb. Bill Press, according to Ultrasaurus, offered some metrics about the scale of the firm’s operation; for example, eight terabytes of searchable information. The incremental indexing zips along with 70 percent of new content and deltas crunched in less than one minute.
Second, Lucid Imagination’s Grant Ingersoll provided some case examples. One sequence jumped out at me; that is: his suggested links for more information:
Lucid Imagination is the go-to outfit for Lucene/Solr engineering and professional services.
Finally, Jon Gifford from Loggly said:
Solr is awesome at what it does, but not so good for data mining. [So] plan to plug in Hadoop for large-volume analytics.
Possible logo for open source search solutions? Image source: http://wargames.spyz.org/convSALAMANDER.html
Will Lucene/Solr abandon their present logotypes and go for something along the line of a Spinosaurus. With Lucene/Solr adoptions moving upwards, a Spinosaurus might have easy pickings from clients of somewhat marginalized commercial search systems in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and other European Commission member states. Snack time may be approaching. SharePoint nibbles, anyone?
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2010
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