Why the UK Shouldn’t Be Concerned About the Gobbling up of Their Tech Industry
May 5, 2016
The article on MotherBoard titled Why the US Is Buying Up So Many UK Artificial Intelligence Companies surveys the rising tech community in the UK. There is some concern about the recent trend in UK AI and machine learning startups being acquired by US giants (HP and Autonomy, Google and DeepMind, Microsoft and Swiftkey, and Apple and VocalIQ.) It makes sense in terms of the necessary investments and platforms needed to support cutting-edge AI which are not available in the UK, yet. The article explains,
“And as AI increasingly becomes core to many tech products, experts become a limited resource. “All of the big US companies are working on the subject and then looking at opportunities everywhere—“…
Many of the snapped-up UK firms are the fruits of research at Britain’s top universities—add to the list above Evi Technologies (Amazon), Dark Blue Labs (Google), Vision Factory (also Google) that are either directly spun out of Cambridge, Oxford, or University College London…”
The results of this may be more positive for the UK tech industry than it appears at first glance. There are some companies, like DeepMind, that demand to stay in the UK, and there are other industry players who will return to the UK to launch their own ventures after spending years absorbing and contributing to the most current technologies and advancements.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Recommind Enables Easier Oversight into E-Discovery for Legal Industry
February 19, 2016
A recent article, entitled Recommind Adds Muscle to Cloud e-Discovery from CMS Wire, highlights an upgrade to Recommind’s Axcelerate e-discovery platform. This information intelligence and governance provider for the legal industry has upped their offering by adding a new efficiency scoring feature to enable “extensive visibility into the overall e-discovery review process.” Recommind make the updated based on polling their clients and finding 80 percent do not have oversight in regards to the technological competency of their outside counsel:
“Citing the same survey, he added that 72 percent of respondents pointed to insufficient visibility into the discovery practices of their outside counsel — legal professionals working with them but outside the firm — as a major concern. Axcelerate Cloud also eliminates the cost unpredictability that arises with traditional hosting charges with cloud-based e-discovery tools providers and the infrastructure maintenance required for on-premises solutions.”
When insights from big data is what a company is after, stronger cloud-based functionality is often the first step. Reminds us of enterprise search firm Autonomy which was eventually sold to HP. What will be next for Recommind?
Megan Feil, February 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Recommind Hits $70 Million
September 16, 2015
A video from the Big Data Landscape, part of their Big Data TV series, brings us an interview with Recommind’s CEO, Bob Tennant. The 11-and-a-half minute video and its transcript appear under the headline, “How Recommind Grew to $70M in Big Data Revenue.”
The interview by Dave Feinleib explores Recommind’s right-moves-at-the-right-time origin story, what its intelligence and eDiscovery software does, and why Tennant is confident the company will continue to thrive. This successful CEO also offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in any field, so check out the video or transcript for those words of wisdom.
Interestingly, the technology Tennant describes reminds us of early Autonomy methods [pdf]. He discusses working with unstructured data:
“So what you have to do is try to understand at a deeper level what’s happening semantically. What Recommind does is marry up a very highly scalable system for dealing with unstructured information– and the kind of database you need for doing that is different than what you would utilize for online transaction processing. But it also marries that up with a very deep knowledge of machine learning, which is the root of the company and where our post-docs were doing their research, to help understand what the key pieces of information in the sea of textual stuff are. And once you understand the key pieces, then you can put that into applications for further use or you can provide it to business intelligence applications to make sense of, or you can feed it elsewhere. But that’s very different from dealing with very structured data that most people are familiar with.”
Launched in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, Recommind provides search-powered analysis and governance solutions to customers around the world. The company’s Malolo technology stack is built upon their CORE information management platform.
Cynthia Murrell, September 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
CSC Attracts Buyer And Fraud Penalties
July 1, 2015
According to the Reuters article “Exclusive: CACI, Booz Allen, Leidos Eyes CSC’s Government Unit-Sources,” CACI International, Leidos Holdings, and Booz Allen Hamilton Holdings
have expressed interest in Computer Sciences Corp’s public sector division. There are not a lot of details about the possible transaction as it is still in the early stages, so everything is still hush-hush.
The possible acquisition came after the news that CSC will split into two divisions: one that serves US public sector clients and the other dedicated to global commercial and non-government clients. CSC has an estimated $4.1 billion in revenues and worth $9.6 billion, but CACI International, Leidos Holdings, and Booz Allen Hamilton might reconsider the sale or getting the price lowered after hearing this news: “Computer Sciences (CSC) To Pay $190M Penalty; SEC Charges Company And Former Executives With Accounting Fraud” from Street Insider. The Securities and Exchange Commission are charging CSC and former executives with a $190 million penalty for hiding financial information and problems resulting from the contract they had with their biggest client. CSC and the executives, of course, are contesting the charges.
“The SEC alleges that CSC’s accounting and disclosure fraud began after the company learned it would lose money on the NHS contract because it was unable to meet certain deadlines. To avoid the large hit to its earnings that CSC was required to record, Sutcliffe allegedly added items to CSC’s accounting models that artificially increased its profits but had no basis in reality. CSC, with Laphen’s approval, then continued to avoid the financial impact of its delays by basing its models on contract amendments it was proposing to the NHS rather than the actual contract. In reality, NHS officials repeatedly rejected CSC’s requests that the NHS pay the company higher prices for less work. By basing its models on the flailing proposals, CSC artificially avoided recording significant reductions in its earnings in 2010 and 2011.”
Oh boy! Is it a wise decision to buy a company that has a history of stealing money and hiding information? If the company’s root products and services are decent, the buyers might get it for a cheap price and recondition the company. Or it could lead to another disaster like HP and Autonomy.
Whitney Grace, July 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Oracle Challenges HP Autonomy Service
April 22, 2015
The article titled Oracle Adds Big Data Integration Tool To Streamline Hadoop Deployments on Silicon Angle discusses the news from Oracle that follows its determination that putting the right tools before users is the only way to allow for success. The Data Integrator for Big Data is meant to create more opportunities to pull data from multiple repositories by treating them the same. The article states,
“It’s an important step the company insists, because Big Data tools like Hadoop and Spark use languages like Java and Python, making them more suitable for programmers rather than database admins (DBAs). But the company argues that most enterprise data analysis is carried out by DBAs and ETL experts, using tools like SQL. Oracle’s Big Data integrator therefore makes any non-Hadoop developer “instantly productive” on Hadoop, added Pollock in an interview with PC World.”
Pollock also spoke to Oracle’s progress, claiming that they are the only company with the capability to generate Hive, Pig and Spark transformations from a solitary mapping. For customers, this means not needing to know how to code in multiple programming languages. HP is also making strides in this line of work with the recent unveiling of the software that integrates Vertica with HP Autonomy IDOL. Excitement ahead!
Chelsea Kerwin, April 22, 2014
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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