Endeca and Collaboration
June 5, 2010
Joining the PTC PartnerAdvantage Programme to provide a direct integration between PTC Windchill and the Endeca Information Access Platform, provides customers with an integrated view across different information sources in their enterprise.
Sys-Con Media recently reported on this new move in their article “Endeca Joins PTC PartnerAdvantage™ Programme to Provide Information Visibility and Analytics across Enterprise Systems”. The addition of Endeca to the PTC PartnerAdvantage Program provides Windchill users with a new solution for combining product lifecycle management, enterprise resource planning, and supply chain data into a single information visibility solution. This new and useful path can support the many daily decisions required as part of their work.
Integrated search can produce muddy results. It is important to deliver the clearest visibility into the information to produce marketable data and survive.
Melody K. Smith, June 3, 2010
Attivio Releases AIE 2.1
June 5, 2010
Short honk: We received a news item from PR Newswire about Attivio’s release of AIE 2.1. The release asserted: “Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine uncovers all the information needed, no matter the source or format, to help users identify trends and opportunities. It joins pertinent data and unstructured information to detect challenges and threats before they become issues. New to AIE, Attivio has incorporated key features including SQL support (via a JDBC driver), key phrase detection, content spotlighting, entity-level sentiment analysis and integrated connector support for active security.” The categorical affirmative is in bold face. “All” is an interesting word in content processing. I know it’s just marketing lingo but “all”. What about those coded text messages from bootleg devices inside certain regulated business facilities? Well, maybe not that “all”?
Stephen E Arnold, June 4, 2010
No one paid me to reference the thrills of a universal affirmative. Forget what a “categorical affirmative” is. Click here.
Silobreaker to Roll Out Report Feature
June 4, 2010
Short honk: We learned from a reader in Europe, that Silobreaker plans to roll out a report feature in the fall of 2010. Silobreaker delivers high value information in an easy-to-digest format. If you are not familiar with the company, navigate to http://www.silobreaker.com/. You can use the free service and upgrade to the industrial-strength version once you get a feel for the depth of the service. Silobreaker supports one or multi dimension queries. When you become a paying customer, you can configure a custom report on a topic of interest to you. You can specify daily, weekly, or monthly updates.
Stephen E Arnold, June 4, 2010
Freebie although I have been assured a fish treat the next time I track down a Silobreaker executive. Promises, promises. I would settle for an answer to my email queries.
Exalead Cloudview Lets Fingers Do the Walking and Caring
June 4, 2010
Yellow Pages Group’s phone application, Urbanizer, selected Exalead Cloudview to collect customer sentiment information. This innovative product is the first restaurant recommendation application that aligns with the emotional element of consumer decision making.
Sys-Con Media reports in “Urbanizer iPhone Application Uses Exalead CloudView to Collect Customer Sentiment Data” () that this new phone application allows users to choose from a selection of pre-defined moods or use Urbanizer’s equalizer function to create a custom mood based on combinations of cuisine, ambiance and service categories. Exalead’s CloudView search-based application platform is embedded into the Urbanizer application architecture and uses semantic extraction capabilities to distill sentiment from unstructured web data from consumer comments posted to Urbanizer.
The advanced semantic technology that Exalead brings to the table seems to be reshaping the digital content landscape. Cloudview collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured business information that can be directly searched and queried.
Melody K. Smith, June 4, 2010
A freebie but maybe a Coca lite when I am next in Paris?
Expresso 2.0 from Coveo Available
June 3, 2010
We learned about Coveo’s release of Expresso 2.0 in a news item sent by one of my two or three readers. The story “Coveo Launches Coveo Expresso 2.0 Beta” stated:
At no cost, Coveo Expresso offers enterprise-class, advanced information access for small- and medium-sized businesses or corporate departments, for up to 50 users, 1 million email items and 100,000 documents. Coveo Expresso is easily expandable to accommodate a larger number of users, at a price point significantly lower than any other enterprise search platform on the market, including appliances, and with far superior functionality. Coveo Expresso has already been downloaded by hundreds of organizations at www.coveo.com/expresso.
Expresso includes expanded access to enterprise information including desktop content, SharePoint files, and file shares, through the Coveo Outlook Sidebar. Users can search across enterprise systems without leaving Outlook, allowing them to "search where they work."
One interesting innovation is what the company calls its “Outlook Sidebar.” This is an enterprise search Outlook plug-in, also includes conversation folding, related conversations, related people, and related attachments, as well as faceted search, allowing users to more quickly find information, helping to speed productivity. We look at a large number of search systems and cannot recall having seen this approach before.
More information about Coveo is available from www.coveo.com.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2010
Freebie
The Lucene Revolution: An Interview with Michael Bohlig of Lucid Imagination
June 3, 2010
Editor’s Note: Lucid Imagination held a Lucene / Solr conference in Prague in May 2010. More than 150 developers and business professionals attended the event. Beyond Search spoke with Michael Bohlig, a senior Lucid Imagination executive about the conference, open source search, and the company’s plans to expand the “Lucene Revolution.”
What was the impetus for the Lucene Solr conference in Prague?
A number of factors led us to host the conference. We were seeing a big increase in interest in Lucene/Solr in Europe. As in other parts of the world, European companies have been looking for alternatives to expensive and inflexible proprietary legacy search solutions. Europe has been a driving force in IT innovation and open source adoption. Finally, there is a large and active Lucene/Solr community in Europe and we wanted to help provide a venue to bring together. developers, users, and the ecosystem.
Can you give me some background for the conference? What was the focus of the event?
We offered two days of in-depth training, followed by a two day conference with a variety of keynotes, technical sessions, tutorials, and lighting talks. The conference was run on a not-for-profit basis with net proceeds contributed to the Apache Software Foundation. The focus for the conference was the disruptive power of open source enterprise search, and how companies are using Lucene/Solr search to develop new innovative ways to tap into big, and increasingly diverse, data.
How many people attended?
More than 160 people attended from all over the world – we had attendees from almost ever country in Europe plus Japan and the US.
What were the topics that generated the most buzz at the conference?
Stephen Dunn of The Guardian did a great talk on how they are using Solr in their Open Platform content sharing service – and how they are working with Lucid Imagination to deploy this new way to unlock their content database and create an innovative business model. Zack Urlocker spoke about the disruptive power of open source and how it is changing the entire enterprise software space – including enterprise search. He used his experience with MySQL as a model, but also looked at a variety of other cases and markets as well, showing how big incumbent vendors get bogged down and find it difficult to innovate, while new open source players can change the game and come up with innovative new solutions and go after under-served markets. He pointed out that the next wave of Web, cloud, and SaaS players have been based on open source, and that in the future making sense of big data will be a killer app. “Solr In The Cloud” by Mark Miller also generated a lot of buzz, describing how Solr’s current and future features will ease the deployment of Solr into large scale, distributed environments at massive scale.
To submit a proposal for a talk, click the graphic.
This sounds like Kool Aid drinking. What were the substantive business payoffs from the use of open source search technology?
Glad to. One good example is The Guardian harnessing content in a new way to re-invent their business model, generate new sources of revenue, and challenge other newspaper and media companies with an open approach. Another is Nordjyske Medier – a Danish media company – that got a big payoff from Solr when their online Yellow and White Pages failed with Google Search Appliance and Microsoft SQL Server.
Can you give me a use case where open source search has bested a commercial search solution such as Autonomy’s or Endeca’s?
There are many examples. Just at the conference we heard from Nordjyske Medier moving off of GSA.
The Guardian was formerly an Endeca user. Also, in one of the sessions at the conference (all are posted at: http://lucene-eurocon.org/agenda.html by the way), Jan Høydahl from Cominvent talked about how to migrate from Microsoft FAST to Solr – and indicated he personally already moved four customers off of FAST to Solr. Of course there are many more cases in the US. One example is Dollar Days, a discount e-tailer which moved off of Endeca to Solr. You can check out the case study on our Web site.
Oracle Search, Just Rebuild the Index
June 1, 2010
Yep, big flows of unstructured content. Stuff the information into Oracle. Index. What could go wrong? To get some insight, navigate to “Using Oracle to Search Text Documents”. For me the most interesting comment in the write up is:
Also, remember to rebuild the index every time you add docs to the table.
Yep, job security for an Oracle database administrator. As the tables get larger and content flows go up, big money to deal with performance associated with real time index rebuilding.Wow. Every time I add a document!
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2010
Freebie
Royal at Autonomy
May 30, 2010
“His Royal Highness the Duke of York Visits Autonomy Headquarters” may not do much for the three North Americans reading this blog. A visit from a royal is a very big deal in Cambridge, England. For me the key passage in the write up was:
Autonomy Corporation plc, a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced that His Royal Highness, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York will be visiting its European headquarters in the Cambridge Business Park. During his visit today His Royal Highness will learn about Autonomy’s unparalleled journey from the engineering research labs of Cambridge University a little over a decade ago to become the largest software company in the UK, a FTSE 100 company and the winner of two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise in the Innovation and International Trade categories. In addition to introductions from Autonomy’s senior management executive team, His Royal Highness the Duke of York will meet Autonomy employees from a range of departments including Autonomy’s award-wining Research & Development team which leads the world in meaning-based software technology solutions.
So what about that next tender offer for search and its requirement for a reference? The Duke of York is an name for the procurement team to consider calling for an Autonomy reference.
Stephen E Arnold, May 30, 2010
Freebie
Endeca and Alfresco
May 30, 2010
Short honk: I wanted to document an item I saw in “Alfresco’s 3.3 ECM Upgrade Delivers CMIS Support, Integration with Lotus Notes, Outlook, Google Docs, Drupal”. Here’s the passage I noted:
Alfresco customers include Boise Cascade, Merck, Air Force, Endeca, Cisco and H&R Block.
Alfresco is a company I associated with open source software. Endeca is a commercial software company. Perhaps Endeca can process content in Alfresco repositories. I can see Alfresco as an Endeca partner, what I thought was called “Eden”. Just wanted to snag this item for future open source reference. There is a big difference between a partner and a customer, or I think there is.
Stephen E Arnold, May 30, 2010
Freebie
SAS Text Analytics and Teragram
May 28, 2010
I received a call about Teragram, the text processing company that SAS acquired a couple of years ago. I did a quick Overflight check and realized that I had not documented the absorption of Teragram into SAS. Teragram’s technology is alive and well, but the SAS positioning is for content processing to be a component of SAS Text Analytics. The product and solution has its own subsite within SAS.com. You can locate the details at http://www.sas.com/text-analytics/.
Another important point is that SAS Text Analytics includes four components. There is the SAS Enterprise Content Categorization function. The system parses content and identifies entities. Metadata are created along with category rules.
The second function is SAS Sentiment Analysis. A number of companies are competing in this sector. The SAS approach sucks in emails, tweets, and other documents. The system identifies various subjective shades in the source content.
SAS Text Miner now includes both text and data mining operations. The system is not one of those Web 2.0, “it is really easy” solutions. The system is easy to use, but to put “easy” in context, you will need programming and statistical savvy along with solid data set building skills.
The SAS Ontology Management solution provides a centralized method for keeping index terms and metatags consistent. Sounds easy, but this type of consistency is the difference between useful and useless information. SharePoint lacks this type of functionality. You have been given a gentle reminder about consistent tagging, dear SharePoint user.
SAS has a blog focused on text analytics. You can read “The Text Frontier” but last time I checked, the blog’s most recent update was posted in March 2010.
Bottomline: Teragram is alive and well, just part of SAS Text Analytics.
Stephen E Arnold, May 28, 2010
Freebie
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