SharePoint: A Six Pack of Servers
July 22, 2008
Mary-Jo Foley, author of Microsoft 2.0 and tireless Microsoft watcher, turns her sharp eye to the polymorphic Microsoft SharePoint Swiss Army knife system. Her “New Studies Highlight the Potential Downsides of SharePoint” is worth reading. You can find the July 21, 2008, essay here. I am fascinated when folks come to grips with the well-wrought SharePoint only to discover its darned complicated.
The most interesting point in Ms. Foley’s essay was:
SharePoint is a collection of six servers that provide document collaboration, portal creation, enterprise search, enterprise content management, electronic forms creation and management and business intelligence functions (analysis and publication of business information).
Okay, six servers, no problem if you have resources (a code word for money, time, patience, and the excitement of trying to find out where SharePoint puts files, scripts, security settings, etc.).
The point of Ms. Foley’s write up is a “new” Forrester study that reports–sit down so you don’t faint–keeping SharePoint customizations to a minimum is a useful tactic.
Ms. Foley cites Janus Boye’s new study. I’m more inclined to flow with Mr. Boye’s analysis. New York consulting firms, like New York lawyers and Canal Street watch dealers, make me nervous.
Now we know. SharePoint is complicated. Perfect for SharePoint consultants and Microsoft fans in information technology departments. SharePoint can be slightly less satisfying for users who want to use a system that is transparent, snappy, and easy to customize.
Complexity may be the fuel that ignites cloud computing, not scintillating salesmanship from Salesforce.com and others in this sector.
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
ComScore: Google’s Search Share Falling
July 22, 2008
ComScore, hard on the heels of Google’s pretty good financial results, reports “US Search Rankings Issued for June, Google Share Down from May”. You can read the news story in Marketing VOX here. If you want to know how bad it is for Google, here’s what ComScore’s analysis revealed:
Google Sites retained its [sic] lead in the US core search market capturing 61.5 percent of the search conducted in June, down slightly from 61.8 percent in May (though in expanded search it gained)…
The “sky is falling headline” baffles me, but it works like a click magnet. The ComScore data are at odds with Hitwise’s recent report.
Neither ComScore of Hitwise count clicks. Both outfits rely on data provided by partners. Google, according to my sources, has the ability to count every click. When one of these outside firms calculates market share, the numbers are general indications, not absolutes.
If you are either Microsoft or Yahoo, Google’s share–whether 60 percent and falling or 70 percent and stable–are meaningless. Both of these companies have to reverse years of inattention to search. Whether Microsoft and Yahoo have to narrow the gap by 50 or 60 percent before Google gains more share is likely to be a thrilling task.
Fiddling in the board room and buying technology that may not scale or cannot be installed without a regiment of engineers is not the way to close the gap. How about a leap frog play? Why not buy Yandex? There are some bold actions to take, but third party firms want to get traffic, sell statistical analyses, and find those lucrative consulting jobs. I applaud their efforts.
Too bad the data are all to often off the mark. Googzilla is, according to my sources, accounting for a significant share of the Web search traffic and a bigger chunk of online advertising. The company faces big challenges, but when I looked out my window the sky was where it was supposed to be and Google was delivering search results with alacrity.
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
Microsoft: Me-Too, Me-Too
July 22, 2008
Matt Asay’s essay “Microsoft Copies Google, Salesforce, and Red Hat in New Partner Initiative” reveals another piece of Microsoft’s “moon shot” to catch Google. You can read the full text here. The premise of the article is that after decades of honing a partner strategy, Microsoft is proving that it is not too old to learn. The notion is that Microsoft is borrowing tactics from Google, Red Hat, and Salesforce.com. For me, the most important statement in the essay was a reference to a comment in The Motley Fool:
Although partners will get a 12% cut of the first year’s subscription, and 6% thereafter, they will now be competing head-to-head against Microsoft for delivering value-added services. This marks a dramatic departure from the way Microsoft has worked with partners in the past.
Is Microsoft now competing with its own partners no matter what size the account? My hunch is that Microsoft is like the US when it first tried to match the Sputnik. The best way to do this is with a dramatic “moon shot” type program. These initiatives toss out the playbook. Engineers and business mavens start with a clean sheet of paper.
Based on my narrow angle of observation from the hollow in rural Kentucky, I see this strategy playing out in SharePoint search. First, the “free” version competes with low-cost providers of search technology. Second, larger Certified Gold Partners find themselves looking at “baked in” search in industrial strength versions of SharePoint. Third, Microsoft bought Fast Search & Technology in order to have an answer for SharePoint customers who wanted to index larger document sets, a feat which SharePoint struggles to accomplish in a snappy, pleasing way. Finally, internal search initiatives at Microsoft are trying to figure out what the future holds.
If catching Google requires the sacrifice of a handful or Airbus full of partners, well, that is an eventuality warranting some consideration. In my opinion, the Certified Gold Partners with search technology have little choice but ramp up their innovation and marketing efforts. This means that Microsoft may face some additional challenges in the enterprise. Google has an abundance of wizards, but a number of the SharePoint snap in search solution vendors have a few budding smarties too.
Catching Google may now be harder. Microsoft will have to chase down Googzilla while dealing with aggrieved former partners. Agree? Disagree? Let me know.
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
Efficient Frontier’s Startling Data about Online Advertising
July 21, 2008
M2, the UK news outfit, reported on a news story that appeared in Telecomworldwire. I tried to get the nested links to work and ran into latency issues. You will want to read the M2 story here. The key point in the item in my opinion was this statement:
According to the report, for every new dollar (USD) spent on search advertising in Q2 2008 versus Q2 2007, Google received USD1.10, while Yahoo! lost USD0.09 and Microsoft Live Search lost USD0.01. Google accounted for 77.4% of total search engine spending in Q2 2008, an increase of 2 percentage points over the previous year. Yahoo! lost nearly 2 percentage points of search engine share in that period, accounting for 17.8% of total spend, while Microsoft Live Search’s share remained relatively stable at 4.8% of search engine spending.
I had seen some of these data elsewhere. But this paragraph underscores the challenge Microsoft, Yahoo, and others in the online advertising game face in their “close the gap” efforts with Google.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
Autonomy: Discovered the Search Revenue Secret
July 21, 2008
Autonomy reported its financial results for its second quarter. You can read the firm’s announcement here. The firm beat analyst expectations. For the period April May June 2008, Autonomy reported revenues of $126 million with an adjusted pretax profit of $51 million. Financial mavens with MBAs and Excel spreadsheets expected revenues of about $41 million. Autonomy’s financials reveal that the company may have found the secret to search revenue generation.
Most companies engaged in search and content processing must struggle to generate growth. For many, profits are like a lump of camphor in the 12th century–out of reach to everyone except those with a lock on a Genoese trading deal.
How does Autonomy do it? is a question that Endeca, Fast Search & Transfer, and more than 300 other companies engaged in fighting for revenues in this enterprise search space? One hint may be Autonomy’s license revenues. These are fees paid to the company by other vendors who use the Autonomy technology in third party applications. Licensing revenues, an approach to search cash, had long been a staple of Verity’s money mix. When Autonomy acquired Verity, Autonomy inherited some of these deals. Like annuities, licensing deals keep paying without much more than caretaker maintenance. A full run down on the Autonomy financial news is available from Google Finance here.
Another hint about Autonomy’s secret formula for money is that two markets have been robust: financial services and media.
Autonomy has been firing news releases at traditional media and news aggregators about contract wins in France and Spain. Plus Autonomy has found customers interested in managing email in order to comply with a crazy quilt of regulations, rules and guidelines.
Coming off a remarkable 12-week run which saw Google and Microsoft share prices take kidney shots, Autonomy is making headway where larger, arguably more technically sophisticated companies are struggling.
The question going forward is, “Will Autonomy continue to assert that it is in the enterprise search business?” The range of products the company offers now stretches from video to fraud detection. Autonomy should be viewed as a diversified enterprise software company of which search is a modest, though important, component. With this type of repositioning, I wonder if Autonomy’s share price, which is considered by some to be in the value stock range, could generate more lift.
Autonomy’s performance–financially, technically, and strategically–warrants close observation. Can the Autonomy wizards repeat the trick in the next two quarters in an arguably difficult financial period?
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
Scale Fail: Amazon and Pizza Team Engineering
July 21, 2008
My news reader is chock full of glowing embers of hostility this morning. It’s 8 30 am in rural Kentucky, where nothing works very well. Power failed again last night, but we have oil lamps and candles. Based on scanning a number of the Amazon S3 outage, Amazon may want to shore up Dr. Werner Vogels’ engineering team today. Shoestrings are great for keeping sneakers on my feet, but massively parallel distributed infrastructures needs a bit more than shareware, cleaver graduate students from the Netherlands, and technical reviews by PhD candidates from University of California computer science programs.
Amazon codes using teams large enough to be fed with one pizza. The idea is that a SOCOM-type unit is better than a rigorous engineering approach found at Boeing or even Microsoft for that matter. Amazon also allows its teams considerable latitude when solving problems. In fact, some teams can use whatever programming language or method that allows the team to solve the problem.
This is a burned pizza. Great ingredients, distracted chef. Source: http://msp71.photobucket.com/albums/i122/xoaleycat926ox/6298db24.jpg
This approach is fast, economical, and flexible. The downside is that if the fix triggers a fault elsewhere, the pizza team or teams must scramble to figure out what happened and why. If the previous team used some off beat language or clever method, then the fixers have to puzzle out the solution. Some folks love puzzles, but I don’t think Amazon Web Services’ customers are too keen on the approach, if I read some of the nasty grams this morning.
Om Malik’s “S3 Outage Highlights Fragility of Web Services” is among the best of the essays I reviewed. You can read his full post here. For me, the key point in his analysis was:
That said, the outage shows that cloud computing still has a long road ahead when it comes to reliability. NASDAQ, Activision, Business Objects and Hasbro are some of the large companies using Amazon’s S3 Web Services. But even as cloud computing starts to gain traction with companies like these and most of our business and communication activities are shifting online, web services are still fragile, in part because we are still using technologies built for a much less strenuous web.
I quite enjoyed Center Networks’ understatement aboiut the problem by reporting Amazon’s own comment:
Amazon S3 has “elevated error rates”.
I think this means crash or fail.
New Idea’s Founder Speaks, New Search Tools Service in Beta
July 21, 2008
New Idea Engineering is one of those specialized engineering firms that keep a low profile because the company is swamped with work. Miles Kehoe and Mark Bennett, the two founders of New Idea have deep experience with search and related technologies. Messrs. Kehoe and Bennett, , revealed in an interview for the Search Wizards Speak series the premise of their firm:
New Idea has from Day One tried to make our products and tools cross-vendor, but none of the major vendors has any incentive to do so until customers start objecting.
This is a clear statement of one reason why search vendors may not rush to resolve some issues for their customers. Now The problems with enterprise search are now becoming more widely known. New Idea’s founders explain why:
…The biggest problem we see in failed implementations is that the technology the customer picked is just not the right one for their environment. Corporate IT managers have to remember that a great demo is indistinguishable from product, but sometimes they seem willing to accept the vendor’s demo as a suitable substitute for their environment. There is also a mind set in many IT departments that search is either not critical – it’s still often a “check-box item” – or that it must be terribly easy…
You can read the full text of the interview here. Additional information about New Idea is here. The company has a useful Web log, and a new addition to the New Idea arsenal of useful resources is a listing of software tools that can help untangle some of the Gordian knots in an enterprise search deployment. An alpha version of the new service called Search Components Online is available here.
Disclaimer: I have provided some information about open source and shareware content transformation tools. Kudos to the New Idea Engineering team for creating a much-needed listing that can help those struggling with flawed enterprise search systems or consultants trying to help their customers get their system back online. I have linked to the company’s enterprise search Web log and cheerfully nabbed nuggets from the company’s informed postings.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
Federated Search: List of Presentations
July 21, 2008
Deep Web Technologies Web log showcases almost two dozen presentations about federated search. The list was compiled by Sol Lederman, one of the key figures at Deep Web Technologies. An interview with Abe Lederman appeared in the Search Wizards Speak series in June 2008 here. The company’s Web log is FederatedSearchBlog.com, and you will want to navigate to this useful list of presentations. Note a couple of the referenced presentations are on a third party service called Slideshare, which some authors referenced by Deep Web Tech rely upon, is troublesome. Kudos to the Deep Web Tech team for their work.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
Microsoft’s Vietnam: Search
July 21, 2008
What an interesting idea. ZDNet posted a short item that caught my attention on this 95 degree Sunday in rural Kentucky. Larry Dignan’s “Microsoft’s Search Ambitions Are Its Vietnam” appeared on the ZDNet Web logs on July 18, 2008. I suggest you read the item here. Mr. Dignan has opened a new line of analysis about the Microsoft – Google face off.
The key point in the piece for me was:
The online services business lost $1.23 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30. I [Mr. Dignan] quipped that it’s no wonder that Microsoft is so hot for Yahoo. Something has to save this online business. And what’s startling about that figure is that Microsoft only lost $732 million in 2007. Microsoft’s online services business was actually profitable in 2005.
Mr. Digan is spot on. One point warrants further comment, however. The cost of catching Google may be beyond Microsoft’s reach. Here’s why?
- Google continues to press forward and Microsoft’s efforts to catch Google seem to be focused on where Google was in late 2006 or early 2007. A leap not a catch up is needed.
- Time is working for Google and against Microsoft. Each month Google continues to increase its lead in Web search. At some point, Google will dominate the market, which means that the race may be over for Web queries and online advertising.
- Google is “seeping” into the enterprise. Microsoft seems confident that its three big revenue producers will fund the online battle with Google. I think the complexity of products like SharePoint will open the door to newcomers, not necessarily Google, by the way. Any revenue loss increases Microsoft’s vulnerability.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know your thoughts.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
Adea Introduces Connector for GSA for SAP
July 21, 2008
Did the acronyms baffle you? GSA is the Google Search Appliance. SAP is the ubiquitous vendor of expensive enterprise software. Adea, a consulting firm, has created an adaptor to “hook” the GSA into an SAP environment. The idea is that instead of the expensive SAP search solutions (TREX and Endeca, for instance), you can buy Google boxes.
The product is Ocelli. The software makes it possible to search SAP data in a simpler way than SAP provides in its default environment. Among the Ocelli functions is support for role-based searches and results display.
For more information about Adea, click here. The Ocelli product information page is here. I don’t have current pricing information at this time.
As Google’s enterprise team gets pulled into more opportunities, companies such as Adea will find it worth their while to create custom software. Google itself seems willing at this time to let its partners carry the ball for integration and customer support in some accounts.
Microsoft started its partner program in a benign way as well.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
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