IBM: Watching Cloud Patterns
June 1, 2008
Last week, IBM announced a cloud-based, software as a service initiative. IBM has partners in this venture, which appears to focus on the insurance niche. The announcement appeared in a news release, and you can read it here.
IBM has teamed with Millbrook, Inc., whose core business is software integration for the insurance industry. Another party to the deal is Sapiens America Corp. Sapiens (whose corporate family tree is pretty complicated) is another specialist with a core competency in property and casualty.
IBM will use its Cognos 8 Business Intelligence system and the Sapiens Insight software. Both systems will make use of the Millbrook property and casualty model.
The idea is that small- and mid-sized insurance agencies will be have access to industrial-strength business intelligence systems without any on premises software. The three companies said in their release:
Business intelligence and predictive analytics tools are becoming the strategic mainstay of how service enterprises in general, and insurance carriers in particular, conduct their daily business. Companies that have near real-time ability to analyze the entirety of their captured business data and extract key performance indicators and accurate answers to “what-if” scenarios can be more responsive to a rapidly evolving business environment and can competitively maximize profitable operations while moving away from risky propositions.
The announcement struck me as significant step for IBM. IBM has been a player in online and cloud-based services for quite a while. In the late 1990s, IBM Global Network ramped up as an Internet service provider eventually selling that business to AT&T. IBM made some noise several years ago about its grid computing capability. Its AlphaWorks initiative has pushed cloud computing as well. Now IBM is testing the water for niche-focused SaaS or Software as a Service. IBM and its new pal Google are working cooperatively on an educational project to stimulate the flow of programmers with expertise in writing programs for distributed systems.
My thought is that this SaaS warrants observation. On paper and in white board “what if” sessions, IBM could deploy a number its software systems as cloud-based services. The question is, “What’s next in online services for IBM?” Will IBM, like Google, sit on the sidelines and watch Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, and other companies push this market forward?
Stephen Arnold, June 1, 2008
Related story from InfoWorld here.
IN-Q-TEL Investments: 2006 to April 2008
June 1, 2008
This table brings the summary of IN-Q-TEL investments through April 2008. You can access the investments from 2000 to 2003 here. The investments from 2004 and 2005 are here.
IN-Q-TEL Investments: 2004-2005
May 31, 2008
I’m delighted with the response to my table and links of IN-Q-TEL’s investments up to 2002. If you want to review this information, click here. In this essay, I want to provide the list of companies receiving funding in the two year period from 2004 to 2005. As one of the people reviewing my list pointed out, there are some companies associated with IN-Q-TEL that do not appear in my table. My source is the publicly-accessible information on the IN-Q-TEL Web site. If you know of an investment that I have omitted, please, use the comments section of this Web log to share your information. I appreciate the numerous suggestions to make the list more useful. There is a limit to what we have time to assemble for a no-cost information resource. Please, tell me what you think would improve the utility of the list. If it’s light weight, then I will consider altering the basic information in the table. The table appears after the jump.
Fast Financials: Three Day Old Fish Should Be Discounted
May 30, 2008
You may want to download the revised financials that are available today–May 30, 2008–on the Fast Search & Transfer Web site here. Information that I recall seeing on various Web sites is either no longer available or I lack the skills to locate the data. Mary-Jo Foley in her All about Microsoft Web log wrote a useful description of the implications of the deal when it was first announced. You can read this story here.
Some Fast Search corporate and general business information has been deleted because it was old or because it was deemed no longer of interest. Fortunately, I have a habit of downloading interesting documents when I first see them. Fast Search information is tough to locate using public Web sites for some reason. You can get these PDF documents directly from http://www.newsweb.no/index.jsp?messageId=209172. The explicit link from the Fast Search Web site with the pointer is here: http://www.fastsearch.com/news.aspx?m=329. Note: I am reluctant to post these documents because I am not certain of the Norwegian guidelines for this type of information.
A screen shot of the restated FY2007 data. I used this information plus the data in the FY2006 restated financials to make the table of numbers below.
A Walk Through
Fast Search’s top line revenues for the period from 2004 to 2007 are now reported as increasing from $66.4 million in 2004 to $143.0 million in 2007. That’s a jump of 115.4 percent. In the search engine game, the increase is good, but it does not match Google’s performance with its Google Search Appliance in the same period. Google went from zero revenue in 2004 to an estimate $400 million in the same period. (Note: that Google reported $188 million for its enterprise unit, but I have calculated monies from its educational initiative, maps, and partner contributions in the form of sign up fees, among other enterprise revenue flows.)
| Year | Revenue (Restated) | Original Revenue Statement |
|
2004 |
$66,374,000 |
$66.300,000 |
|
2005 |
$98,069,000 |
$100,300,000 |
|
2006 |
$133,741,000 |
$162,200,000 |
|
2007 |
$142,979,000 |
n.a. |
Nothing too dramatic in this run down except the sharp decrease in FY2006 numbers. But what’s $30 million in today’s loosey goosey financial world? However, when you look at the Fast Search restatements in terms of revenue, I found the losses interesting.
A Warning Signal from Fast Search
I have a copy of the Fast Search & Transfer Mid Quarter Presentation by Joseph J. Lacson, dated December 2006. That document has some optimistic comments about Fast Search’s opportunities. The presentation is no longer available on the Fast Search Web site, but I have made a couple of screen shots from the presentation to give you a sense of what caught my attention. (Since the document is no longer available on the Web, you may want to skip my discussion of this information. I wish I could provide a link to the full document, but I don’t have permission to do that. I wrote Fast Search’s PR department, but I haven’t heard anything from them.)
Knewco: Community Tags
May 29, 2008
Peter Suber offers a clear, detailed post about a new approach to community tags. You can read his post “Combining OA, Wikis, Community Annotation, Semantic Processing, and Text Mining” here. Mr. Suber includes a link to a discussion of the idea in Genome Biology here.
What’s interesting to me is the specialist nature of the effort. Although anyone can tag, the focus is STM (scientific, technical, and medical). The idea is to create rich indexing for technical information. I think this is a good idea. I think there will be challenges because a small number of people do most of the work. Nevertheless, these types of projects are sorely needed.
The company responsible for the technology is Knewco, founded by several academics. You can learn more about the firm here. Knewco has developed some tag options that are interesting. I think the value will come from POW or “plain old words”.
Why do I care about this and what’s the wiki variant have to do with search? Well, a lot. First, technical information has long been in the hands of a small number of multi-national firms. If you want to search engineering or chemical information, you have to use specialist files and sometimes pay big, big online access charges. This type of project is one more example of the research community feeling its oats. Good for researchers and potentially threatening to the oligopolies in the STM information business.
Second, I like the idea that information innovation is coming from thinkers outside the traditional IR (information retrieval) community. When I go to conferences, there are 20-somethings who have an opportunity to lecture me on their major insight, Use For references. Okay, been there. Done that. Fresh thinking is important, and I am delighted that Knewco is trying pop ups, colors, and other bells and whistles that may point to some new directions in tagging.
Finally, the larger the body of publicly accessible tags, the better the next-generation systems will be. Google, as I point out in my new study due out in September 2008, is focused on making its software smarter. Humans play a role, but the GOOG knows the value of indexing, taxonomies, tags, and their breathern.
On the downside, I don’t like the company name “Knewco”. In fact, Knewco uses coinages for its different functions; for example, a “knowlet”. I hate having to memorize a neologism for something I call a cross reference. But that’s a personal preference. Check the company’s Web technology here.
Stephen Arnold, May 29, 2008
Good Enough Means Trouble for Commercial Database Publishers
May 28, 2008
I began work on my new Google monograph. (I’m loath to reveal any details because I just yesterday started work on this project.) I will be looking at Google’s data management inventions in an attempt to understand how Google is increasing its lead over search rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo while edging ever closer to providing data services to organizations choking on their digital information.
As part of that research, I came across several open source patent documents that explain how Google uses the outputs of several different models to determine a particular value. Last week a Googler saw my presentation which featured a Google illustrative output from a patent application and, in a Googley way, accused me of creating the graphic in Photoshop.
Sorry, chipper Googler, open source means that you can find this document yourself in Google if you know how to search. Google’s system is pretty useful for finding out information about Google even if Googlers don’t know how to use their own search system.
How does Google make it possible for my 86-year-old father to find information about the town in Brazil where we used to live and allow me to surface some of Google’s most closely-guarded secrets? These are questions worth considering. Most people focus on ad revenues and call it a day. Google’s a pretty slick operation, and ads are just part of the secret sauce’s ingredients.
Running Scenarios In my experience, it’s far more common for a team to use a single model and then run a range of scenarios. The high and low scenario outputs are discarded, and the results are averaged. While not perfect, the approach yields a value which can be used as is or refined as more data become available to the system. Google’s twist is that different models generate an answer.
This diagram shows how Google’s policy of incremental “learnings” allows one or more algorithms to become more intelligent over time.
The outputs of each model is mathematically combined with other models’ outputs. As I read the Google engineers’ explanations, it appears that using multiple models generates “good enough” results, and it is possible, according to the patent document I am now analyzing, to replace models whose data are out of bounds.
Lawyers: Mixed Opinions about Law and Online Giants
May 26, 2008
I’m no attorney (thank goodness). I don’t understand lawyers, lawmakers, or the pundits who explain what legal eagles do, don’t do, and won’t do.
Two news items caught my attention. Despite my feeling lousy, I decided to urge you to read both. The CNet story explains that Viacom is suing Google for one billion dollars. Google argues that it complies with applicable copyright laws. The old media company and the new media company are going to meet in court. (Someone told me that 95 percent of litigation is resolved before going to trial.) You can read this clear write up here.
The other story is from ZDNet Australia about a judge in that country who opines that “Google, Yahoo Make Lawmakers Impotent”. You can read it here.
The Australian judge offers the opinion that technology is changing too fast for the courts. Technology allows some companies to “beat the legal system”.
Lawyers, based on my limited experience, are not good technologists. My sample is small, but the attorneys whom I have known also have trouble with math. Suggest that a Riemann zeta function is a use procedure, and I experienced a nervous chuckle. The sidekick of blind justice were not sure if I was kidding, or I were serious.
In my first Google study “The Google Legacy” and in my second “Google Version 2.0” I argued that lawyers could kill Google. Both are available from Infonortics Ltd. in Tetbury, Glou.
I’m not sure if “kill” is the correct word. A legal process can suck money, management attention, and public perception at prodigious rates. A sufficiently bad run of luck in the courts could slap a weight jacket on the GOOG.
On the other hand, lawyers, if the Australian judge’s observation is somewhat accurate, might be their own bear trap. A lawyer trying to explain how algorithms and teenagers undermine a traditional media giant could confuse matters in an interesting way.
My view is that technology is not just outpacing the legal system. Technology is in the process of redefining some of the principles that are codified in many countries’ laws. The problem is analogous to the wrenching of the Roman legal system before Julius Caesar and the wild and crazy mess that followed his brief term in office. Roman law never adapted. One might point out that Italy’s present legal system is still pretty wacky. Nevertheless, the Italian technologists in Modena, Bologna, and Rome seem to be innovating without much friction from Italian courts.
Yahoo could be taken out by the courts. The company is in “transition”. Google, on the other hand, may have the resources to deal with lawyers who want to put technology in its place, snap a shock collar on Google, and keep the clueless traditional giants paying those fat, fat fees. In law, attorneys’ math is good enough to get those bills in the mail.
Stephen Arnold, May 27, 2008
Government High-Tech Investments: IN-Q-TEL
May 26, 2008
I received an email from a colleague new to the Federal sector. Her email included comments and links about US government funding of high technology companies. I was surprised because I assumed that most people knew of the IN-Q-TEL organization. As US government urls go, IN-Q-TEL’s will baffle some people. First, the hyphens throw off some folks. Then the group’s use of the Dot Org domain is another.
In a nutshell, IN-Q-TEL makes clear what it does and why:
IN-Q-TEL identifies, adapts, and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US intelligence community.
I’m not interested in whether IN-Q-TEL is doing a great job or a lousy job. I’m not concerned about its mission, its funding, or its management team.
What I find fascinating is the organization’s choice of companies in which to invest. I don’t know the budget range of IN-Q-TEL, but my sources tell me that the investments stick close to $1 million, sometimes more, sometimes less. You can read more about IN-Q-TEL at these links:
- The Wikipedia entry, and I am not vouching for the accuracy of this entry
- The CIA’s own description here
- KMWorld’s write up here. (I am a paid columnist for KMWorld, but I did not contribute to this story.)
The purpose of this feature is to provide a snapshot of the companies in which IN-Q-TEL has invested. I’ve identified more than 70 companies. This is too many to put in one posting, so I will break up the list and cover the period 2000 to 2003 here and do each subsequent year in additional Beyond Search postings.
In the period from 2000 to 2003, IN-Q-TEL invested in 25 companies. Keep in mind that I may have overlooked some in my research. If you know of a company I missed, please, use the comment section of this Web log to update my information. These appear in the table below:
Usability: A Must Read from the WSJ
May 24, 2008
I’m too nerdy to read the Wall Street Journal every day. A few minutes with most stories, and I feel as if an MBA consultant were telling me that investment bankers are really nice people. I made an exception this morning, and I strong urge you to navigate to the Journal’s “Business Technology” Web log here.
The post “Business Software Vendor Finds Business Software impossible to Use” carries a date of May 21, 2008, but I just saw it. Nevertheless, this is an important story. The main point for me is this statement:
IFS, a business-software vendor, sent us [the Wall Street Journal] … the results of a survey earlier this year of more than 1,000 respondents. Its findings: “A full 60 percent of respondents said their enterprise software was somewhat difficult, very difficult or almost impossible to use. Only 9 percent characterized their applications as very easy to use.” The biggest time wasters, IFS found, were the need to search through complex navigation systems to find information and the need to learn how to use many programs that all worked differently.
Why is this important? First, the data substantiate my research, Sinequa’s data, and Jane McConnell’s information about enterprise search. High dissatisfaction rates and wasted time–these are the cripplers of some organization’s efficiency and decision making.
I’m going to try and get my hands on the full study from IFS. The Web log post doesn’t tell me how to get a copy. The WSJ provides this link to a study summary here. I filled in the IFS form here, but as of 7 am Eastern on May 24, 2008, I don’t have a copy. I want one. If you come across the full report, let me know.
Usability, not technology, is the key to success it seems. Hasn’t this been Steve Jobs’s mantra for a long time? Good work, Vauhini Vara. A content quack to you from the Beyond Search goose.
Stephen Arnold, May 24, 2008
Enterprise Search Endnote
May 22, 2008
A surprised squawk from the Beyond Search goose. In the end note (the wrap up talk for the two day conference about enterprise search in New York City), the data bunny made a brief and long-awaited appearance. The introduction to the end note made a note that her name was henceforth ‘search bunny’. After the laughter subsided, I made these points to summarize the more than 36 presentation dilivered over the 14 hours of the formal program.
The Data Bunny makes an appearance
First, this conference marked the first major meeting about enterprise that discussed ways to improve usability of existing systems and move beyond key word retrieval. The point was that most enterprise search users don’t feel comfortable sticking words and phrases in a search box and then perusing lists of results to see if the magic answer has been delivered.
Second, research data from my work and other industry experts substantiate the need for alternative interfaces. Graphics, although tasty eye candy, are not the answer. Information must be provided in a manner that meets the needs of individual users and the work task at hand. Forcing a laundry list of results on every user is out of step with today’s information environment.
Third, interfaces can use mobile functionality such as that available from Coveo’s mobile mail search service. An interface can combine a search box with a list of topics and categories like the one on the Oracle Technology Network’s Web site which is based on Siderean Software’s technology. Google has disclosed in a patent application an interface that presents a dossier or report. Instead of a list of topics, the output includes facts about the topic. One feature is a hot link to a map showing the location of the subject. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
To wrap up the conference, the audience was challenged to:
- Demand more from vendors. Passivity, which allows the vendor to lead the licensee, has to give way to the licensee getting the vendor to deliver the solution the organization needs to succeed.
- Recognize that Google’s more than 9,500 Google Search Appliance licensees are buying into the idea that complex search is expensive, expensive, and prone to problems. Simplicity, stability, and extensibility are more important than 1,001 meaningless features.
- Embrace the opportunity to take a clean sheet of paper and redeine search in terms of information access.
The novelty of typing in two words and getting some results has given way to a greater appetite to solutions that work in the context of a work task.
After the formal presentation, several of the more than 300 in the audience, posed some questions. Here’s a summary of the questions that were asked more than one time:
Question: What’s the future of metadata and taxonomies?
Answer: Metadata is becoming more important. News types of metadata — who changed what in a document when? Who were the recipients of the document? — and similar trans-meta types of tagging are the next wave in metadata. So, the work associated with metadata is in its infancy.
Question: Why do you say ‘Search is dead?’
Answer: That’s shorthand for saying, “Most users don’t want to be shackled to a search box. Some users will want the search box as a primary means of access. A larger number of users want options for access. The search box, therefore, can no longer be the primary access vehicle in my opinion.
Question: Why did you mention only three companies?
Answer: I speak extemporaneously. I don’t read my talks. The examples–Coveo, Google, and Oracle–seemed relevant when I put together my examples 30 minutes before my remarks. I would like to have time to name many other vendors. I track the search and content processing technology of more than 50 organizations. In 20 minutes, there are hard limits on what I can do.
Question: Are you paid for these types of remarks?
Answer: I charge for everything. If organizations did not pay me, I would not be able to fund my research, pay for dog food, or buy airline tickets. As a consultant, my product is my time. Therefore, to use my time means that the conference organizer has to pay me.
Stephen Arnold, May 21, 2008
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