Mark Logic Taps Amazon
January 25, 2010
Cloud Computing “Mark Logic Leverages Amazon” reported that MarkLogic Server offers a cloud option. According to the write up said:
The move will obviously let customers use its widgetry on a pay-by-the-hour basis. A native XML database that implements the W3C-standard XML Query (XQuery) language, the server includes full-text and structured (XML) search. The AWS version consists of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with the MarkLogic Server pre-installed.
Mark Logic’s technology has demonstrated its versatility in a number of information-centric environments. With a client’s information within the MarkLogic Server environment, repurposing is a snap. In the last year, Mark Logic has emerged as an information infrastructure company that makes big boys like Oracle quite nervous. With the move to the cloud option, Mark Logic is poised for new services. Mark Logic’s technology exerts pressures on companies in business intelligence, enterprise publishing, and information portal services, among others.
When Larry Ellison worries, I take notice. Important step from Mark Logic.
Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2010
Yes, I was given a free admission to the Mark Logic user conference in Washington, DC. No, I was not paid to point to this write up about the Sys-Con story. Yes, I will beg Mark Logic to throw large sums of money at me and the goslings the next time I see one of the firm’s senior managers or investors. I will report this intent to the FCC via this footnote. Wow, I feel so much better explaining that I am a shameless marketer.
SharePoint Sunday: A Slow Week
January 25, 2010
The goslings and I were surprised at the lack of search related information from Microsoft and its certified developers in the last seven days.
We did come across one write up in Get the Point, “SharePoint Server 2010 Inside Scoop: Where’s the Site Search Drop Down Menu?” We have to confess that we have never looked for the site search drop down menu, and the tip may be quite helpful to some.
The drop down menu is gone but it can be restored. Here’s the method:
“…Click Site Actions, Site Settings. Under Site Collection Administration, choose Site Settings.
To return to the SharePoint Server 2007 experience, under Site Search Dropdown Mode, choose Show and default to contextual scope.”
Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2010
A freebie. I will report this unpleasant situation to the Department of Navy, which specializes in finding underwater, concealed objects.
The Blank Spaces in Social Media
January 25, 2010
For the last 14 months I have written a monthly column for Information World Review. I don’t recycle that information in this Web log. In fact, I try to steer clear of repeating information within and across my monthly columns and this Web log. I thought I would have a dearth of information with the writing demands these place upon me and the equally addled goslings.
I was wrong.
On February 1, 2010, we are going to create a second Web log with the very hot title of SSN. I won’t reveal what it is about. I can say that it will NOT discuss the social security numbering system. I am going to operate the information service as a test for several months. If we hit a comfortable stride, then we will shift from a public beta test to a full-scale operation.
Yes, we will accept advertising, advertorials, and other marketing tie ups. Some of the conventions of Beyond Search and the ArnoldIT.com services will be linked to the new Web log. No, we have not worked out the details, but one of the team is going to grab hold of this angle and manage this aspect of the new information service.
The broad topic area will fit between real time search (my Information World Review column), my Google write ups (the KMWorld column), and my area of expertise (large scale online search and systems). We will have the exact positioning hammered out by Wednesday of next week with the first content live online a few days later.
A Real Editor
The editor for this Monday through Friday Web log will be Jessica Bratcher, a former newspaper editor. She continues to instruct me in how “real” journalists work. I will never learn because I am a sales person with few skills and not much energy.
She has assembled a team of goslings to be who will follow the conventions of the Web log world with a heck of a lot more journalistic acumen than I bring to the write ups in this Web log.
The Content
The Web log will feature some new approaches to content germane to online information.
First, each week there will be a dialog about a particular online issue of interest to business professionals. The idea is to take a topic and look at it from different viewpoints. In Beyond Search, there is a single point of view, and we want to explore topics from different angles. The trope will be a semi-Socratic dialog involving my partners in this new, free online information service. Even though different people will be involved, you will recognize the dialog from its new icons:
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Notice that both icons represent squawking and noisy birds. The idea is to have an edge and present information a person involved in business will find somewhat useful.
Second, there will be lists. A traditional Web log forces certain content into a stack with the most recent information at the top and the older information buried at the bottom of the pile. The new Web log will put certain information—such as lists and reference information—on pages that are static. We think you will find it easier to locate some of the special content we are gathering for this new information service.
IBM Mainframe PR at Odds with Reality
January 23, 2010
I am on record as loving mainframes. However, smart outfits find other ways to crunch petabytes of data quickly without the costs, hassles, and peculiarities of mainframes. Even today, when I hear or read the word “mainframe” I think of disc crashes that could send chunks of metal into cabinet sides, JCL, and moving wires to achieve performance boosts. I know that IBM’s PR group wants me to think Series z, Linux, and more fun than a day at Frye’s in Palo Alto. Won’t happen.
I read “IBM Mainframe Woes Continue with Big Q4 Drop” and said to myself, “The addled goose is not flying blind with regard to mainframes.” The story said:
System z mainframe revenue dropped 27% in the fourth quarter compared to the same period in the prior year. The Q4 results followed declines of 26% in the third quarter, 39% in the second quarter and 19% in the first quarter. IBM doesn’t provide revenue dollar amounts for individual server product lines, but the mainframe suffered the biggest decline within the company’s systems and technology group, which reported fourth quarter revenue of $5.2 billion, 4% lower than the previous year. The systems and technology group also includes storage, x86 servers and Power servers.
Google and even Facebook seem to be happy with their approach to petascale computing, and I don’t think mainframes figure in either company’s plans. Here are the reasons:
- Architecture. Still anchored in the late 1960s.
- Configuration. Really tedious.
- Performance. Expensive when compared to commodity set ups.
And search? You can still buy a STAIRS variant. Wow. IBM is mostly a consulting and services outfit. My hunch is that SAP and Microsoft will be following in IBM’s footsteps. Times are indeed shifting gears.
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2010
A freebie. No one has paid me a single penny to write about my affection for mainframes. I will report this to the House of Representatives who may not share my feelings for these gizmos from another era.
Who Buys Business Intelligence?
January 22, 2010
In December 2009, I printed out the write up “Business Intelligence (BI) Procurement Survey Results”. I am not into business intelligence, but I am interested in information about the procurement of enterprise software and systems. I read this document on the flight to Detroit earlier this week, and I noted several factoids or semi factoids that struck me as important.
The article appeared in a blog produced by MAIA Intelligence:
a company committed to developing and continually improving powerful Business Intelligence reporting and analysis products to meet the needs of corporate implementations, application service providers and value-added resellers. We serve each of our clients with integrity. No single client is more important than our professional reputation.
I profiled MAIA Intelligence for a client a couple of years ago, and it is clear that the firm has invested some money in its Web site and its information outreach activities. Like most surveys, there is not much data about the size of the sample, the methodology for selecting the sample, margin of error, and the other stuff that annoys first year statistics students.
Nevertheless, here are the items that I circled on my hard copy:
- Marketing, finance, and senior executives are the folks who are the top dogs when it comes to business intelligence. Information technology folks don’t care too much.
- The person who says “yes” or “no” to a business intelligence purchase is usually a C level executive. This horrible convention for referring to top management means that a person who is in charge makes the decision.
- The typical business intelligence purchase takes less than six months. In short, the cost of the sale is going to be high from follow ups, handholding, and the negotiation process
- Those in this sample reported that an in house installation was the preferred approach.
You can review the survey results and pluck your own gems from the write up. I am wondering how long it will take for business intelligence companies to shift their clients to a hosted or cloud based solution. The bottleneck for business intelligence is getting custom queries into the system. With search vendors starting to offer business intelligence solutions, will this trend have a material impact on the business intelligence world. IBM owns a number of business intelligence properties, and there are bunch of small and mid sized firms in the space. The Google has some interesting capabilities in this area as well.
My conclusion is that I am not sure that I know what “business intelligence” means. It is like “enterprise search”: confusing, fragmented, and capable of supporting conflicting claims that a potential buyer has a tough time interpreting.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
Okay, another free post. I will report this sad fact to one of the agencies responsible for intelligence. They have a need to know.
Information Builders WebFOCUS Magnify
January 22, 2010
I wrote about Information Builders in my report for the Gilbane Group a couple of years ago. I was updating my files, and I wanted to pass along a bit of information about this product. Information Builders is a vendor of enterprise solutions. The company spans data management, business intelligence, and dashboards. You can get basic information about the firm’s products on the firm’s Web site. There are some diagrams showing how Information Builders’ software “snaps in” to most enterprise computing infrastructures.
Information Builders rolled out more than 100 changes to its WebFOCUS product line. According to TDWI, there have changes to the dashboard and the predictive analytics. For search, TDWI says:
“WebFOCUS Magnifyƒz a search navigation tool that dynamically categorizes search results and supplements them with analysis and reporting capabilities, has been updated with new features designed to enhance both usability and security. Highlights include:
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- Collections, enabling users to select a collection that narrows their search to a specific part of the index, prior to their submission
- Magnify iWay Wizard, helping users to quickly set up a Magnify environment, instructing them how to handle each field when transforming a record into a search result
- New security features including single sign-on integration, multiple credential support, the ability to hide entire results and parts of results, and present alternate-result rendering as well as a security API”.
The search product indexes content, using what the company calls “real-time transactional indexing method”. The results list provides relevance ranked output plus facets to allow point and click navigation. The screenshot below shows one possible results display. The system is fully customizable, so you can create the look and feel you want.
If you are an Information Builders’ customer running the company’s business intelligence system, the search system (WebFOCUS Magnify) integrates with that Information Builders’ product. The company says:
A user’s inquiry does not end with search results. Those results will often lead to new questions, which, in order to be answered, require numbers analysis, aggregations, and value comparisons that can only be achieved through business intelligence. For example, a search for a bank account may lead the user to want to know more about its cash flow patterns, expenditures by time frame, and other transactions. Magnify allows a user to drill down directly from search results into the reporting system, so any natural language search can be instantly expanded to include numbers analysis. Search terms are fed to the WebFOCUS platform as parameters that automatically trigger the generation of reports or guided ad hoc forms that can be used to further refine report content.
The company added support for Web content three or four years ago. You can read about this aspect of WebFOCUS in “Information Builders Google-izes BI.” The company has been surfing on Google for a couple of years. You can get an overview of Information Builders’ Google components on the Google Solutions Marketplace.
I have never been able to get a firm grip on the Information Builders’ pricing for its search and content processing technology. I did learn that the WebFOCUS Intelligent Search component for the Google OneBox for Enterprise is free. You can learn more about this product from the Google Solutions Marketplace. You can read about this “surf on Google” play in the March 2006 Computer World article “Information builders, Google Build Corporate BI Search Tool.” I just haven’t heard much about the success of this software component.
Stephen E Arnold, January 22, 2010
Okay, here’s the scoop. A freebie. I will report this to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an outfit that combines work and data analysis. That’s the oversight group for me.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Pricing
January 22, 2010
Short honk: I was fooling around with the updates to my dataset of search and content processing vendors. I came across a note to myself about Oracle Secure Enterprise Search pricing. I neglected to put this information in this Web log, allegedly the repository of information I want to remember. Silly goose! If you want to snag a copy of OSES 10g as the product is labeled, you can find that a perpetual license is $34,500 per processor. What’s not clear to me is if a quad core chip is on a single die, does that die constitute a single processor fee of $34,500 or will a single quad core processor trigger a license fee of $34,500 * 4 or $138,000? I looked around for an answer, but I did not land upon that detail. First year support costs $7,590. So a dual quad core machine and a fail over system costs either $69,000 or $276,000 plus support. I located the pricing information on the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search page.
The description of the product which seems to be 10g is:
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) is a standalone product that allows you to find relevant documents faster in your information repositories. It crawls, indexes and makes your corporate intranet searchable through a Web-style search. It organizes content from multiple repositories by extracting valuable metadata that can be used in portal application, provides effective search with the best relevance ranking in the industry – and finds what you want. It eliminates the need for coding against hard-to-use low-level APIs. It provides the best database integration and most secure search in the industry and includes:
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- The ability to search and locate public, private and shared content across intranet web content, databases, local disk or file servers, IMAP email, document repositories, applications, and portals
- Excellent search quality, with the most relevant items for a query spanning diverse sources being shown first
- Sub-second query performance
- Highly secure crawling, indexing, and searching
- Integration with Desktop Search tools
- Ease of use, administration and maintenance
If you are an Oracle DBA, OSES makes sense. But if you are a penny pinching CFO, you might want to compare the Oracle perpetual license fee with other vendors’ products. You can keep tabs on Oracle search news at the Overflight page on ArnoldIT.com. Lots of tweets about Oracle, but not much hard news. I wonder why.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
A freebie. No one at Oracle paid me to write this pricing item, nor did I get any money to omit pointing out that the Oracle flagship database is at Version 11 and OSES is at 10. I will report this to the Oracle users in the Old Executive Office Building where some financial types work, often late at night.
Attensity Goes for Mobile
January 21, 2010
I saw the headline “Attensity Announces New Mobile Features for Attensity Analyze for VOC”. VOC means voice of the customer. The acronym is gaining popularity as a synonym for customer support. As you know, customer support sounds so darned good and so easy to say when giving a sales pitch. But when you buy a gizmo and have a question, customer support is almost as bad as having a kidney stone when you are having a root canal. I find the “your call will be recorded for quality purposes” one of the most memorable pieces of disinformation I have encountered. When one gets to a person, I find that the individual reads a script and often does not listen to my question.
I lost a bank ATM card whilst undergoing a security check at Boston Logan airport on January 6, 2010. When I arrived in Philadelphia, I discovered that my bank ATM card, a gift card for a book store, and a handful of business cards were missing. I called my bank and requested that the card be “killed”. I was rushing to a connecting flight, and the bank reluctantly agreed to “kill” the card but only after I agreed to a $10 service charge, providing my social security number twice, my address twice, and verification via a “yes” or a “no” that I had an account at the bank. That made a wonderful impression on me because I don’t think there are too many people who knew the card number, my social security number, my bank account number, and my middle name. The institution? Ah, the fraction bank, Fifth Third.
Customer support, therefore, raises some sunken baggage, and I think the VOC acronym is designed to dance around the connotations of customer support. Well, I learn quickly, so this news story is about customer support. Attensity, according to the news item,
announced new mobile functionality for its award-winning Attensity Analyze for VOC. … Attensity Analyze for VOC offers users deeper capabilities for understanding and acting on customer feedback.
The story continued:
The new mobile functionality for Attensity Analyze for VOC enables users of mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone, the Verizon Droid, and the Google Nexus One to analyze Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback across a variety of customer conversation channels including emails, CRM notes, survey responses and social media. Users can select any of their Attensity Analyze dashboards and switch between various views from any mobile device. Interactive drill-downs allow for deep exploration of data, while automatic issues and topic alerts allow customer service professionals and executives to be alerted in near-real time to potential crises or issues with their company or their competitor’s products.
If you are struggling with your own organization’s customer support demons, you may want to check out the Attensity offering. Sounds really good. Just like an executive’s promise that his / her company provides customer support.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
Oyez, oyez, oyez. (I think I needed three oyezs to check out Google deduplication method revealed in US6658423.) I received no dough for this write up. I will report this sad fact to the Federal Reserve Bank in St Louis, a publisher of economic research on many topics often unrelated to monetary policy.
Bitext and NaturalFinder: Breathes Life into Legacy Search Systems
January 21, 2010
In December 2009, the managing director of Bitext, a Madrid-based software development company, bought me a hamburger. As we poked at London’s version of a Whopper, I learned that Bitext had developed a way to take a not-so-useful legacy search system and give it new life. I thought the idea was a good one because many organizations do not have the money, time, or information technology expertise to do a “rip and replace” solution to their search woes.
What does Bitext offer?
The product is called NaturalFinder. Bitext’s new language technologies make it possible to enrich a user’s queries with linguistic knowledge. The system has emerged in the international market after being implemented in the Spanish national railroad and a number of commercial enterprises.
Users of enterprise search systems have to hit on the exact combination of key words to get the information needed to answer a business question. This takes time and, according to the company’s CEO, Antonio Valderrabanos, “inefficient searching costs companies money. We developed NaturalFinder to take the rough edges off existing enterprise search solutions. We have a search turbo charger which really delivers.”
I told Bitext that research reports from Net Strategy (Paris), the Association of Image and Information Management (USA), and my team here at ArnoldIT.com (USA) say one thing: users want systems that deliver needed information without trial and error.
“With companies asking employees to do more, guessing the secret word combination to unlock the treasure chest of corporate affronting is no longer acceptable. Bitext allows the user to key a word and our technology understands the meanings and displays suggested results. A single click takes the user to results that what the user intended,” Mr. Valderrabanos told me.
The Bitext system uses a range of linguistic technologies, including word stemming, synonyms, and homonyms, among others. These technologies are invisible to the user. Once a query is entered into a search system equipped with the Bitext software, that search system generates rich metadata such as names, concepts, and events.
The system does the work for the user. The result is, “quicker searches with no training and no system slowdown”, according to Mr. Valderrabanos. “One of the technical innovations is that the Bitext NaturalFinder technology requires no changes to an organization’s existing search system. It is load and go.”
After I finished my burger, I got a full demo of the new system. I told Mr. Valderrabanos:
In my opinion, your Bitext system is one of the first search enhancements that work out of the box. The Google Search Appliance gains greater utility without the time and complexity of coding a customized software widget. Bitext has broken new ground with NaturalFinder.
Bitext has engineered its system to work with Microsoft SharePoint Server, the Google Search Appliance, Oracle Text Search, Autonomy, Endeca, and legacy Fast ESP installations. The system enhances the utility of Lucene and other open source search solutions.
NaturalFinder supports English, French, and Spanish, as well as other languages. Bitext’s engineers can develop customized applications for customers who have special requirements such as those of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Bitext was founded in 2007 by experts in linguistics and based in Europe. The company is focused on making natural language text meaningful for computers. In addition, Bitext develops linguistic technology (dictionaries, grammars and ontologies) for OEM integration with any third-party application: from search to sentiment analysis, contextual advertising, spam filters, business intelligence, etc.
You can get more information about Bitext at www.bitext.com
Stephen E. Arnold, January 20, 2010
As I pointed out, I received a hamburger and a demonstration. I wish to disclose this to the FDA to make clear that the addled goose will sit through a demo as long as he is fed a quasi-Whopper. Alas! I received no cash. Oh, I got fries.
Location Aware Search via Lucene / Solr
January 19, 2010
I located an interesting and helpful post “Location Aware Search with Apache Lucene and Solr” on IBM’s developer works Web site. If you are not familiar with Developer Works you can get additional information by clicking this link. This is IBM’s resource for developers and IT professionals. If you want to search for an article about “location aware Lucene”, you can get a direct link to “Location Aware Search with Apache Lucene and Solr” from the search box at www.ibm.com. That’s a definite plus because the IBM Web site can be tough to navigate.
The write up is quite useful. Like some of the other content on the Developer Works Web site, the author is not an IBM employee. The Lucene / Solr write up is by a member of the technical staff at Lucid Imagination, a company that offers open source builds of Lucene and Solr as well as professional services. (Lucid is interesting because it resells commercial content connectors developed by the Australian company ISYS Search Software.)
The write up is timely and provides quite a bit of detail in the 6,000 word write you. You get a discussion of key Lucene concepts, geospatial search concepts, information about representing spatial data, a discussion of combining spatial data with text in search, examples, sample code, a how to for indexing spatial information in Lucene, a review of how to search by location, and compilation of links to relevant information in other technical documents, interviews with experts, and code, among other pointers.
Several observations:
- The effort that went into this 6,000 word write up is considerable. The work is quite good, and it strikes me as cat nip for some IBM centric developers. IBM is a Lucene user, and I think that IBM and Lucid want to get as many of these developers to use Lucene / Solr as possible. This is a marketing approach comparable to Google’s push to get Android in everything from set top boxes to netbooks.
- The information serves as a teaser for a longer work that will be published under the title of Taming Text. That book should find a ready audience. Based on the data I have seen, many organizations—even those with modest technical resources—are looking at Lucene as a way to get a search system in place without the hassles associated with a full scale search procurement for a commercial system.
- The ecumenical approach taken in the write up is a plus as well. However, in the back of my mind is the constant chant, “Sell consulting, sell consulting, sell consulting”. That’s okay with me because the phrase runs through my addled goose brain every day of the week. But the write up makes clear that there is some heavy lifting required to implement a function such as location aware search using open source software.
The complexity is not unexpected. It does contrast sharply with the approach taken by MarkLogic, an information infrastructure vendor who is making location type search part of the basic framework. Google, on the other hand, takes a slightly different approach. The company allows a developer to use its APIs to perform a large number of geospatial tricks with little fancy dancing. Microsoft is on the ease of use trail as well.
Some folks who are new to Lucene may find the code a piece of cake. Others might take a look and conclude that Lucene is going to be a recipe that requires Julia Childs in the kitchen.
Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2010
A freebie. An IBM person once gave me an hors d’oeuvre and an Lucid professional bought me a flavored tea. Other than these high value inducements, I wrote this without filthy lucre’s involvement. I will report this to the National Institutes of Health.
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