Sinequa Cozies Up to Actuaries
February 10, 2010
Short honk: A happy quack to the team at Sinequa. The company landed a deal with the US benefits consulting outfit, Mercer. Chock full of actuaries, Mercer provides benefits-related services, an arcane area that baffles the addled goose. According to the information provided to Beyond Search,
Sinequa Enterprise Search will boost Mercer’s productivity, making employees more efficient by enabling them to quickly find relevant information and leverage intellectual capital across the organization. The initial phase of the project has been deployed in the UK, where Mercer has 3,000 employees and an intellectual capital alone consisting of more than 30 million documents. Mercer had previously implemented both desktop and intranet search solutions. However, these disparate search solutions fueled the need for a single unified enterprise search solution.
You can get more information about Sinequa at http://www.sinequa.com. An interview with the managing director of Sinequa is available in the Search Wizards Speak series.
SAP Demonstrates Management Floundering
February 9, 2010
Short honk: SAP, the European software superstar with the TREX search deal and an investment in Endeca, has zigged when I expected a zag. I read “SAP CEO Apotheker Resigns With Immediate Effect, Co-CEOs Named” and learned that two CEOs are better than one, or that’s the theory. What happens to TREX? What will this mean for Endeca? Not much. I think search is the least of SAP’s concerns at this time. The traditional enterprise software business may be entering a boundary condition.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
A freebie. I will report this to the Red Cross, an outfit who may want to think about sending assistance to the firm mentioned in this write up.
Microsoft Realizes Its $1.3 Billion Challenge
February 7, 2010
My wife watched the film Titanic last night. I enjoyed the picture but the scenes that stuck in my mind were the calm officers who were on a sinking ship. Nifty but not too many survivors. I fell asleep before the film ended. I assume everyone was saved, but that was a motion picture, not real life.
Last week there were some icebergs spotted and a big ship speeding among them.
Phone calls and emails from frantic 20 somethings who want to write a story before heading to yoga. A couple of clients pinging me about the future of enterprise search. Even a fax from a UK client who wanted a link to the Fast Linux integrator / consulting outfit Comperio, where some of the original Fast engineers now work.
Ships in iceberg territory.
Let’s take these inquiries—informed, desperate, meaningful, and clueless—and probe each.
First, a rumor surfaced about 10 days ago that there was a shakeup in the Microsoft Fast unit. The rumor I heard from a contact in Scandinavia was that Microsoft was backing away slowly from Fast’s Linux and Solaris versions of ESP and I thought I heard a reference staff who were told “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”. Apparently those bidding farewell wore penguin pins on their parkas.
I then read a pretty good write up by Kurt Mackie in RedmondMag.com called “Fast Search Will Be a Windows Only Product.” In my opinion, the most interesting comment in that write up was attributed to the fellow running Microsoft search, or at least one of the people running Microsoft search:
We will always interoperate with non-Windows systems on both the front- and back-end, Olstad wrote. Our search solutions will crawl and index content stored on Windows, Linux, and UNIX systems, and our UI controls will work with UI frameworks running on any operating system. [Emphasis added]
Don’t you believe in categorical affirmatives? Well, I am careful with broad statements that imply “diamonds are forever”.
I don’t know what the staffing situation is, but I was surprised it took Microsoft’s business experts more than 18 months to realize the complexity, cost, and legal issues associated with the Fast Search & Transfer SA’s technology. The Fast company cost MSFT about $1.2 billion. Then there was the December 2009 departure of the Microsoft CFO on whose watch the deal went down (Chris Liddell). The whole acquisition struck me as an possible indication that Microsoft’s acquisition team was not as informed as it should have been with Fast ESP (enterprise search platform). I concluded that Microsoft did not have real ESP (extrasensory perception) when it decided to buy Fast Search. Then I was pitched enterprise search as a user experience with a tile of images is not going to deal with the brave new world of search enabled applications, eDiscovery, and seamless access to structured and unstructured data. Interface is one thing. Meeting users’ information needs in the enterprise is quite another.
Source: http://ar-d.com/images/emailblast/bing%20visual.png
Second, I documented in this Web log one public statement that a Fast ESP customer was done with the product due to lack of service, technical capabilities, etc. You can read that story to which I pointed in this Web log as “Microsoft Fast Questioned by Ayna”. Most licensees just grandfather a search system and move on. What made this story interesting is that Ayna went on the record on its Web site specifically pointing out the problems the company had with the Microsoft Fast system. Remarkable. This addled goose’s rule of thumb is that where there is one really annoyed customer there are probably lots more sitting in their cubicles wondering how to extricate themselves from a muddle.
Third, the whole Windows plumbing versus Unix plumbing does not require much technical acumen to understand. Trying to support an aging search technology with layers of acquired code, home brew scripts, open source software, and licensed “components” is a challenge in my experience. Now add engineers steeped in the arcana of Dot Net. The mixture triggers long meetings and slow, slow progress.
Microsoft Study Discloses Cost Savings from Avoidance of On Premises Software
February 6, 2010
Talk about a weird study. Read, please, “Microsoft Study Reveals Small and Midsize Businesses Using Hosted Services Have Better Financial Performance.” The idea behind this research is to make a case for cloud computing. For me, the most interesting passage in the write up was:
The SMB IT and Hosted IT Index 2010 commissioned by Microsoft researched 3,193 SMBs in a cross section of private industries in 15 countries. Overall, the findings show greater awareness of the benefits of IT among SMBs and a high reliance on IT across all industries and geographies. The findings indicate a clear path toward better financial performance than for those not currently taking advantage of IT advances such as hosted services.
I concluded that anyone in a small or mid sized business with on premises installations of Microsoft’s ubiquitous software would be better off getting this stuff via the cloud. Great conclusion because this suggests to me that Microsoft’s software is dragging down the financial performance of its customers. What?
Stephen E Arnold, February 6, 2010
Nope, no pay for this write up. I will report this sad situation to the Pew crowd, an outfit familiar with outstanding research.
Another Shot across the Bow of the Oracle Tanker
February 5, 2010
Oracle, in my opinion, is similar to those giant oil tankers that one can see in ports around the world. Some—like the vessels parked off the west coast of England—are just waiting for an economic uptick. Others dribble oil as they grind thousands of miles from one place to another. Every once in a while, one of these oil tankers dumps its cargo and makes headlines.
Oracle is an oil tanker in the enterprise software world. The company’s core technology is expensive to scale, mostly in my view because it, like DB2, was designed and built after the Korean War. Once the Oracle tanker leaves Sea World Parkway, it is tough to stop and almost as difficult to turn around quickly.
Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Oil_tanker_Omala_in_Rotterdam.jpg
There are some positives to the Oracle solution. Clueless investors like to hear “Oracle is our database engine” without understanding the implications of that phrase. I suppose the investors could ask the Salesforce.com engineers or the Amazon.com engineers who babysit the Oracle tanker at the core of their organization, but most just resonate with the brand name. And if the licensee has the human and financial resources, Oracle can scale. Presumably Oracle’s owning Sun Microsystems will help with the one-stop scaling shop, no non-Oracle hardware required going forward. And for any given problem, Oracle has a solution. Middleware. No problem. Search. No problem. XML capability like Mark Logic’s no less. No problem. Applications. No problem. ERP. No problem. Consulting. No problem. Google Search Appliance. No problem.
The downsides are easy to summarize. You need an Oracle DBA or multiple Oracle DBAs to keep the tanker shipshape. You need money. You need consulting support from Oracle. Getting help off the reservation can lead to some tense meetings with the Sea World crowd. Once in a while the “no problem” becomes a problem, and I will leave it to your own business savvy to figure out the implications of an errant Oracle service.
When I read “Netezza Teams Up with NEC to Battle Oracle”, three thoughts crossed my addled goose brain:
- Oracle is getting some competition from an unexpected pair, NEC and Netezza. Will HP, Dell, and Cisco find data management partners too? I think this will be fun to watch.
- What will IBM do? IBM’s PR department has been working overtime on the mainframe renaissance which seems to be of minor luminescence. IBM cannot sit on its hands and allow NEC and Netezza to go after Oracle and probably DB2. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
- Will the Google roll out its enterprise data management service, which of course does not exist, cannot possibly be a service, and has absolutely no traction within the Google management team?
Bottomline: Life is going to force Oracle to become even more aggressive. I am glad I am in Harrod’s Creek and not involved in procuring oil tanker software any longer.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2010
No one paid me to write about software in sea faring terms. I will report this sad fact to MARAD.
Exalead Reports Banner Year
February 5, 2010
Exalead contacted me after reading the posts about Autonomy and Coveo. The essence of the message from the Paris-based, search-enabled-applications company was,
Despite the economic downturn, Exalead continued its growth in 2009 with a worldwide revenue of $22,7M. Software sales grew by almost 20% in France and by 30% in the US, which is a great source of satisfaction to us. We added 50 new references to our global customer base, achieving a 25% growth. (Exalead source)
I followed up and learned that the experienced a strong demand for its professional services revenues. The company is, according to my Exalead source, a leader in “SBA”. This acronym means search-based applications.
Exalead indexes the Google Web logs on the ArnoldIT.com Web site as part of my team’s effort to provide demonstrations of participating vendors’ technology. You can see the Exalead search system with entity extraction and other features at http://overflight.labs.exalead.com/.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
No one paid me to write this short item. I will demand that the Exalead CTO provide me with a Diet Pepsi next time I am in Paris. No wine, please. The goose is an alcohol-free zone, avoids paté, and usually steers clear of CDG. I will report this lack of payment to the Department of State. Bring back American fries!
Autonomy Hits $740 Million in Revenues
February 4, 2010
The lads from Cambridge have, according to the Denver Business Journal, hit $740 million in revenue. You must read “Autonomy corporation plc Announces Results for the 12 Months and Fourth Quarter Ended December 31, 2009.” The addled goose points out that Autonomy is a heck of a marketing company. Now its approach to growth is paying off. Google does a good job staying in the headlines, but its financials don’t shed much light on its revenues from the Google Search Appliance. Microsoft Fast search revenues are even more difficult to discern. Oracle and search are the most difficult to pin down. Endeca is privately held, so the figures circulating for that firm are tough to validate. Most of the other players in the enterprise search sector are working to catch up with Autonomy, but that will be hard for three reasons:
First, Autonomy grows via an inorganic method. The firm buys a content sector and then converts that firm to the Autonomy way of processing information. The result is an increase in sales opportunities plus whatever upside in cash and revenues accrue from the deal. Autonomy is better at this game than OpenText, which has a similar approach.
Second, Autonomy has a wide range of market sectors into which it can push its products and services and from which it can take great ideas and offer them to existing Autonomy clients. A good example is the Zantaz business which put Autonomy in the hosted services business.
Third, and it is a repetitive point, Autonomy is a savvy marketer. The company has a track record of sniffing trends and moving quickly.
There are some issues that I have noted in my write ups for clients and my search studies. With each acquisitions, Autonomy’s engineers have more integration and other fiddly code tweaks to undertake. Go too quickly and Autonomy gets in front of the market. Go too slowly and Autonomy has to spend to play catch up. This is a balancing act and so far Autonomy has been doing an okay job.
In addition, there is a large installed base of Verity, Autonomy, Interwoven, and other software plumbing. Customer support is one challenge. The other is that some competitors can focus resources on a particular client of niche and deliver a combination of price and quality that can siphon off some accounts. So far Autonomy has been able to handle these thrusts, but going forward, one of these competitors might find a way to take some bites out of market sector that Autonomy is unable to keep in the stable.
Finally, there is the pressure to make sales. This can fatigue marketing people who must create compelling messages, clients who must listen to sales presentations, and sales professionals who have to bring home the new accounts. Once again Autonomy has been able to keep its sales force focused, but as the company grows larger, plain old management becomes an ever larger challenge.
When will Autonomy hit $1.0 billion in revenue? When it makes its next big acquisition. Rumors are floating around the goose pond as I write this. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
No one paid me to write down these obvious comments about the financial and managerial health of Autonomy. I will report non compensation to the National Institutes of Health.
Coveo Reports Record Fourth Quarter 2009 Results
February 4, 2010
I learned via the Coveo Web site that the Coveo search and content processing company turned in a strong fourth quarter. I did learn that the company closed 37 deals and closed its Series B round of financing. In addition, the company’s engineers have continued to expand the capabilities of the Coveo platform. Coveo is privately held, and I was not able to get my hands on specific numbers. According the company,
Coveo expanded relationships with existing customers, including CA and GEICO, and added new enterprise clients including one of the world’s largest restaurant companies; Quantum Corp., the leading global specialist in backup, recovery and archive; as well as Trading Technologies, Platt Electrical Supply, Laureate Education, Inc., Grand Circle Travel, and several other leading organizations.
The Coveo team pointed me to a client, John Ragsdale, VP of Technology at Technology Services Industry Association who said:
Tied to no single knowledge base or content management tool, Coveo’s platform does very creative indexing of all enterprise and customer support content (biggest library of packaged connectors I’ve seen) and enables additional attribution or meta data to be associated to the content–sort of sophisticated tagging. With the slickest mashup capabilities I’ve seen–including real time data pulls–they have created dashboards, pulling in and analyzing data from any number of content sources, and showing the results. It is much more than a search engine, or a dashboarding tool, or a reporting platform, though it can do all of these things well. Additionally, by enriching existing content with additional metadata, Coveo can help companies leverage old legacy systems that still serve their purpose but don’t allow much in the way of integration or reporting.
The question becomes, “What’s next?” For more information, navigate to www.coveo.com.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to write this article. I am still waiting for the taco promised to me in October 2009 by one of Coveo executives. I will report this misstep to the director of the GSA’s cafeteria in Washington, DC.
Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 2
February 4, 2010
This is the second part of the interview with Raymond Bentinck of Exalead.
Isn’t this bad marketing?
No. This makes business sense.Traditional search vendors who may claim to have thousands of customers tend to use only a handful of well managed references. This is a direct result of customers choosing technology based on these overblown marketing claims and these claims then driving requirements that the vendor’s consultants struggle to deliver. The customer who is then far from happy with the results, doesn’t do reference calls and ultimately becomes disillusioned with search in general or with the vendor specifically. Either way, they end up moving to an alternative.
I see this all the time with our clients that have replaced their legacy search solution with Exalead. When we started, we were met with much skepticism from clients that we could answer their information retrieval problems. It was only after doing Proof of Concepts and delivering the solutions that they became convinced. Now that our reputation has grown organizations realize that we do not make unsubstantiated claims and do stick by our promises.
What about the shift to hybrid solutions? An appliance or an on premises server, then a cloud component, and maybe some fairy dust thrown in to handle the security issues?
There is a major change that is happening within Information Technology at the moment driven primarily by the demands placed on IT by the business. Businesses want to vastly reduce the operational cost models of IT provision while pushing IT to be far more agile in their support of the business. Against this backdrop, information volumes continue to grow exponentially.
The push towards areas such as virtual servers and cloud computing are aspects of reducing the operational cost models of information technology provision. It is fundamental that software solutions can operate in these environments. It is surprising, however, to find that many traditional search vendors solutions do not even work in a virtual server environment.
Isn’t this approach going to add costs to an Exalead installation?
No, because another aspect of this is that software solutions need to be designed to make the best use of available hardware resources. When Exalead provided a solution to the leading classified ads site Fish4.co.uk, unlike the legacy search solution we replaced, not only were we able to deploy a solution that met and exceeded their requirements but we reduced the cost of search to the business by 250 percent. A large part of this was around the massively reduced hardware costs associated with the solution.
What about making changes and responding quickly? Many search vendors simply impose a six month or nine month cycle on a deployment. The client wants to move quickly, but the vendor cannot work quickly.
Agility is another key factor. In the past, an organization may implement a data warehouse. This would take around 12 to 18 months to deploy and would cost a huge amount in hardware, software and consultancy fees. As part of the deployment the consultants needed to second guess the questions the business would want to ask of the data warehouse and design these into the system. After the 12 to 18 months, the business would start using the data warehouse and then find out they needed to ask different types of questions than were designed into the system. The data warehouse would then go through a phase of redevelopment which would last many more months. The business would evolve… making more changes and the cycle would go on and on.
With Exalead, we are able to deploy the same solution in a couple months but significantly there is no need to second guess the questions that the business would want to ask and design them into the system.
This is the sort of agile solution that businesses have been pushing their IT departments to deliver for years. Businesses that do not provide agile IT solutions will fall behind their competitors and be unable to react quickly enough when the market changes.
One of the large UK search vendors has dozens of niche versions of its product. How can that company keep each of these specialty products up to date and working? Integration is often the big problem, is it not?
The founders of Exalead took two years before starting the company to research what worked in search and why the existing search vendors products were so complex. This research led them to understand that the search products that were on the marketplace at the time all started as quite simple products designed to work on relatively low volumes of information and with very limited functional capabilities. Over the years, new functionality has been added to the solutions to keep abreast of what competitors have offered but because of how the products were originally engineered they have not been clean integrations. They did not start out with this intention but search has evolved in ways never imagined at the time these solutions were originally engineered.
Wasn’t one of the key architects part of the famous AltaVista.com team?
Yes. In fact, both of the founders of Exalead were from this team.
What kind of issues occur with these overly complex products?
As you know, this has caused many issues for both vendors and clients. Changes in one part of the solution can cause unwanted side effects in another part. Trying to track down issues and bugs can take a huge amount of time and expense. This is a major factor as to why we see the legacy search products on the market today that are complex, expensive and take many months if not years to deploy even for simple requirements.
Exalead learned from these lessons when engineering our solution. We have an architecture that is fully object-orientated at the core and follows an SOA architecture. It means that we can swap in and out new modules without messy integrations. We can also take core modules such as connectors to repositories and instead of having to re-write them to meet specific requirements we can override various capabilities in the classes. This means that the majority of the code that has gone through our quality-management systems remains the same. If an issue is identified in the code, it is a simple task to locate the problem and this issue is isolated in one area of the code base. In the past, vendors have had to rewrite core components like connectors to meet customers’ requirements and this has caused huge quality and support issues for both the customer and the vendor.
What about integration? That’s a killer for many vendors in my experience.
The added advantage of this core engineering work means that for Exalead integration is a simple task. For example, building new secure connectors to new repositories can be performed in weeks rather than months. Our engineers can take this time saved to spend on adding new and innovative capabilities into the solution rather than spending time worrying about how to integrate a new function without affecting the 1001 other overlaying functions.
Without this model, legacy vendors have to continually provide point-solutions to problems that tend to be customer-specific leading to a very expensive support headache as core engineering changes take too long and are too hard to deploy.
I heard about a large firm in the US that has invested significant sums in retooling Lucene. The solution has been described on the firm’s Web site, but I don’t see how that engineering cost is offset by the time to market that the fix required. Do you see open source as a problem or a solution?
I do not wake up in the middle of the night worrying about Lucene if that is what you are thinking! I see Lucene in places that have typically large engineering teams to protect or by consultants more interested in making lots of fees through its complex integration. Neither of which adds value to the company in, for example, reducing costs of increasing revenue.
Organizations that are interested in providing cost effective richly functional solutions are in increasing numbers choosing solutions like Exalead. For example, The University of Sunderland wanted to replace their Google Search Appliance with a richer, more functional search tool. They looked at the marketplace and chose Exalead for searching their external site, their internal document repositories plus providing business intelligence solutions over their database applications such as student attendance records. The search on their website was developed in a single day including the integration to their existing user interface and the faceted navigation capabilities. This represented not only an exceptionally quick implementation, far in excess of any other solution on the marketplace today but it also delivered for them the lowest total cost of ownership compared to other vendors and of course open-source.
In my opinion, Lucene and other open-source offerings can offer a solution for some organizations but many jump on this bandwagon without fully appreciating the differences between the open source solution and the commercially available solutions either in terms of capability or total cost. It is assumed, wrongly in many instances, that the total cost of ownership for open source must be lower than the commercially available solutions. I would suggest that all too often, open source search is adopted by those who believe the consultants who say that search is a simple commodity problem.
What about the commercial enterprise that has had several search systems and none of them capable of delivering satisfactory solutions? What’s the cause of this? The vendors? The client’s approach?
I think the problem lies more with the vendors of the legacy search solutions than with the clients. Vendors have believed their own marketing messages and when customers are unsatisfied with the results have tended to blame the customers not understanding how to deploy the product correctly or in some cases, the third-party or system integrator responsible for the deployment.
One client of ours told me recently that with our solution they were able to deliver in a couple months what they failed to do with another leading search solution for seven years. This is pretty much the experience of every customer where we have replaced an existing search solution. In fact, every organization that I have worked with that has performed an in-depth analysis and comparison of our technology against any search solution has chosen Exalead.
In many ways, I see our solution as not only delivering on our promises but also delivering on the marketing messages that our competitors have been promoting for years but failing to deliver in reality.
So where does Exalead fit? The last demo I received showed me search working within a very large, global business process. The information just appeared? Is this where search is heading?
In the year 2000, and every year since, a CEO of one of the leading legacy search vendors made a claim that every major organization would be using their brand of meaning based search technology within two years.
I will not be as bold as him but it is my belief that in less than five years time the majority of organizations will be using search based applications in mission critical applications.
For too long software vendors have been trying to convince organizations, for example, that it was not possible to deploy mission critical solutions such as customer 360 degree customer view, Master Data Management, Data Warehousing or business intelligence solutions in a couple months, with no user training, with with up-to-the-minute information, with user friendly interfaces, with a low cost per query covering millions or billions of records of information.
With Exalead this is possible and we have proven it in some of the world’s largest companies.
How does this change the present understanding of search, which in my opinion is often quite shallow?
Two things are required to change the status quo.
Firstly, a disruptive technology is required that can deliver on these requirements and secondly businesses need to demand new methods of meeting ever greater business requirements on information.
Today I see both these things in place. Exalead has proven that our solutions can meet the most demanding of mission critical requirements in an agile way and now IT departments are realizing that they cannot support their businesses moving forward by using traditional technologies.
What do you see as the trends in enterprise search for 2010?
Last year was a turning point around Search Based Applications. With the world-wide economy in recession, many companies have put projects on hold until things were looking better. With economies still looking rather weak but projects not being able to be left on ice for ever, they are starting to question the value of utilizing expensive, time consuming and rigid technologies to deliver these projects.
Search is a game changing technology that can deliver more innovative, agile and cheaper solutions than using traditional technologies. Exalead is there to deliver on this promise.
Search, a commodity solution? No.
Editor’s note: You can learn more about Exalead’s search enable applications technology and method at the Exalead Web site.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
I wrote this post without any compensation. However, Mr. Bentinck, who lives in a far off land, offered to buy me haggis, and I refused this tasty bribe. Ah, lungs! I will report the lack of payment to the National Institutes of Health, an outfit concerned about alveoli.
Exegy Delivers Ultra High Performance Hosted Service
February 3, 2010
With the buzz about real time content processing and outfits like Thomson Reuters delivering really fast throughput, I was not surprised to read in Wall Street & Technology that Exegy has gunned its engine and driven into the low latency hosted content processing service business. “Exegy Deploys Ultra Low Latency Ticket Plant on Options PIPE Platform” reports that Exegy has teamed with Options IT to make its Ticket Plant available on the Options IT platform. If you are not familiar with these firms, both support customers who require low latency access to information. The article said:
The Option PIPE platform is a fully optimized and managed, software-vendor-neutral, global technology infrastructure, providing clients with the efficiencies of a hosted technology service delivered with the scalability, strength and security of an enterprise solution. The hosted Exegy Ticker Plant is the first hardware-accelerated market data appliance built from the ground up to ensure high-frequency traders continuously have the best view of the electronic markets.
Exegy has engineered its hardware, firmware, and software to chop latency from content processing. For more information about Exegy navigate to http://www.exegy.com. For information about Options IT, point your browser to http://www.options-it.com/.
In a drag race, which vendor would win? I would lean toward the Exegy teams. Serious invention from that crowd in my opinion. I described Exegy in a a couple of my studies of next generation content processing vendors because the company distinguished itself with low latency crunching for the Wall Street crowd that has been thinned along with me in the economic melt down.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
No one paid me to write this short article. I will report non payment to the IRS who cares about me. No, it really cares. For me. For you. For everyone.
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