SuccessFactors Deal: More Little Googzilla Steps to the Enterprise
August 5, 2008
On my fun filled ride back from the sublime beauty of central Illinois, I had some time to think about Google and its enterprise ambitions. Dave Girouard, the wizard who runs this unit, looks like a movie star. He’s Googley, which most people forget. I don’t think a company with a stake in the enterprise market should underestimate Google or Mr. Girouard.
A recent example is Google’s deal with SuccessFactors. No, this is not the Dale Carnegie formula about knowing the prospect’s wife’s dog’s favorite snack. This SuccessFactors has about four million users worldwide for its performance management software. Like Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors in a cloud service, and it is a serious cumulus not the toothless mammatus that IBM’s cloud initiative invokes for me. You can read more about SuccessFactors here.
Network World has a good story about this Google – SuccessFactors tie up. Chris Kanaracus’ article is “SuccessFactors Integrates with Google Apps. You can read it here. The company has not focused on one or two Google applications. SuccessFactors has integrated:
- Google Talk
- Google Calendar
- Google Docs
- Google Book Search
- Google Maps.
The write up on the SuccessFactors’ Web site is at http://www.successfactors.com/google/.
Why is this important?
The complexity of on premises installations is rising. If you were starting your own company today, would you use your cash for servers, IT professionals, and big money software? Or, would you use cloud services and apply your cash and personnel resources to your core business? Unless you are in the information technology business, the cloud services make a great deal of sense.
I met with a young person working on a business plan as part of her MBA. I was amused to see that the company’s IT infrastructure was in the cloud.
The Google is working through Googley partners to seep into organizations. Other Google tie ups are designed to piggy back on an another company’s sales and customer support infrastructure.
This is an attack based on the strategy of allowing Roman soldiers to marry women in a country that Rome just beat in war. Rome became part of the natural course of events in that territory. Slowly, the territory was Roman. The strategy ran out of gas in the 4th century, but that’s plenty of time for most rulers.
Google is playing the same marry-and-conquer game. Their partners are thrilled and flattered. Suddenly the partners are Googley. And the progeny? Well, that’s going to be a problem for IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle in the future.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2008
SharePoint: Anyone Not Baffled, Please, Stand Up
August 5, 2008
For years–even before I wrote the first three editions of CMSWatch’s Enterprise Search Report–I have been pointing out that enterprise search in general is not so useful and Microsoft enterprise search in particular is in the bottom quartile of the 300 or so “enterprise search” offerings available.
In a sense, it’s gratifying that youngsters are starting to look at the reality of information in an organizational setting and asking, “What’s wrong with these vendors and their systems?” You can get a dose of the youth movement in what I call search realism here. Shawn Shell, embracing knowledge about enterprise search, identifies some of the wackiness that Microsoft employees routinely offer about enterprise search or what I call “behind the firewall” search. I am pleased with the well-crafted article and its pointing out that Microsoft has a bit of work to do. I find it amazing that four years after the first edition of Enterprise Search Report, that old information is rediscovered and made “new” again.
Even more astounding is the Microsoft news release about the Fast Search & Transfer acquisition, which became official, on August 4, 2008. You can read the full text of this news release, as reported in AMEinfo here. Quoting Patrick Beeharry, Server and Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint in the Middle East and Africa, AMEinfo reported Mr. Beeharry as saying:
‘With our companies combined, we are uniquely positioned to offer customers what they have been telling us they want most – a strategy for meeting everything from their basic to most complex enterprise search needs. We are pleased to have the talented team from FAST joining us here in the Middle East. Together we aim to deliver better technologies that will make enterprise search a ubiquitous tool that is central to how people find and use information.
Okay, Microsoft is offering a strategy. I don’t know if a strategy will address the problems of information access in an organization. Vivisimo’s white paper takes this angle, and I think that the cost issues I raised are fundamental to a strategy, but I may be wrong. Maybe a strategy is going to tame the search monster and the 50 to 75 percent of the users who are annoyed with their existing search and retrieval system.
I suppose I was not surprised to read in To the SharePoint: The SharePoint IT Pro Documentation Team Blog the essay, “Which Microsoft Search Product Is for You?” You must read this stellar essay here. For me, the key point was this table:
You can see the original here if this representation is too small. The point is not to read the table. My point is look at the cells. The table has 35 cells with the symbol Ö and seven cells with no data. In the table’s 54 cells only seven have data. For me, the table is useless, but you may have a mind meld with the SharePoint team and intuitively understand that High availability and load balancing is NULL for Search Server Express and Ö for Search Server 2008 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. How about a key to the NULL cells and the Ö thingy? (For more careless Microsoft Web log antics, click here. The basics of presenting information in tables seems to be a skill that some Microsoft professionals lack.)
Er, what about Fast Search & Transfer? The day this Web log posting appeared, Microsoft officially owned Fast Search, but it seems to me that either the author was not aware of this $1.2 billion deal, had not read the news story referenced above, or conveniently overlooked how Fast Search fits into the Microsoft search solution constellation. I can think of other reasons for the omission, but you don’t need me to tell you that communication seems to be a challenge for some large organizations.
The net net is that Microsoft has many search technologies; for example:
- Powerset
- Fast Search & Transfer (Web indexing and behind the firewall indexing)
- Vista search
- Live.com search
- The SharePoint “flavors”
- SQLServer “search”
- Microsoft Dynamics “search”
- Legacy search in Windows XP, Outlook Express (my heavens), and good old Outlook 2000 to 2007.
The word confusion does not capture the Microsoft search products. Microsoft has moved search into a manifestation of chaos. If I’m correct, licensees need to consider the boundary conditions of these many search systems. Hooking these together and making them stable may be fractal, not a good thing for a licensee wanting to make information accessible to employees. The cost of moving some of these search systems’ functions to the cloud may be resource intensive. I wanted to write impossible, but maybe Microsoft and its earnest Web log writers can achieve this goal? I hope so. Failure only amps the Google electro magnet to pull more customers from Microsoft and into the maw of Googzilla.
I am delighted to be over the hill. When senility finally hits me, I won’t have to struggle through today’s ankle biters making the old new again or describing symptoms, not diagnosing the disease. Don’t agree? Set me straight. Agree? You are too old to be reading Web logs, my friend.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2008
Search Options: Betting in a Down Economy
August 5, 2008
Paula Hane, who writes for Information Today, the same outfit paying me for my KMWorld column, has a very interesting run down of search engine options here. I agree with most of her points, and I think highly of the search systems which she has flagged as an option to Google.
But I want to take another look at search options and, true to my rhetorical approach, I want to take the opposite side of the argument. Ms. Hane who knows me has remarked about this aspect of my way of looking at information. Keep in mind I am not critical of her or Information Today. I want to be paid for my most recent column about Google’s geospatial services, the subject of the next column for KMWorld.
Here goes. Let’s get ready to rumble.
First, search is no longer “about search”. Search has become an umbrella term to refer to what I see as the next supra national monopoly. If you are looking for information, you probably use search less than 20 percent of the time. Most people locate information by asking someone or browsing through whatever sources are at hand. Search seems to be the number one way to get information, but people navigate directly to sites where the answer (an answer) may be found. I routinely field phone calls from sharp MBAs who prefer to be told something, not hunt for it.
Second, fancy technology is neither new nor fancy. Google has some rocket science in its bakery. The flour and the yeast date from 1993. Most of the zippy “new” search systems are built on “algorithms”. Some of Autonomy reaches back to the 18th century. Other companies just recycle functions that appear in books of algorithms. What makes something “new” is putting pieces together in a delightful way. Fresh, yes. New, no. Software lags algorithms and hardware. With fast and cheap processors, some “old” algorithms can be used in the types of systems Ms. Hane identifies; for example, Hakia, Powerset, etc. Google is not inventing “new” things; Google is cleverly assembling bits and pieces that are often well known to college juniors taking a third year math class.
Third, semantics–like natural language processing–is a hot notion. My view is that semantics work best in the plumbing. Language is slippery, and the semantic tools in use today add some value, but often the systems need human baby sitters. No one–including me–types well formed questions into a search box. I type two or three words, hit enter, and start looking at hits in the result list.
Fourth, social search sounds great. Get 200 smart people to be your pals and you can ask them for information. We do this now, or at least well connected people do. As soon as you open up a group to anyone, the social content can be spoofed. I understand the wisdom of crowds, and I think the idea of averaging guesses for the number of jelly beans in a jar is a great use of collective intelligence. For specialized work, let me ask a trusted expert in the subject. I don’t count jelly beans too often, and I don’t think you do either. Social = spoof.
Fifth, use a search system because a company pays you. Sorry, I don’t think this is a sustainable business model. Search is difficult. Search requires that a habit be formed. If the pay angle worked, the company would find that it becomes too expensive. The reason pay for search works is that not too many people search to get paid. When a person searches, there’s a reason. Getting a few pennies is not going to make me change my habits.
What’s this mean for Google competitors?
My contrarian analysis implies:
- Competitors have to leap frog Google. So far no one has been able to pull this off. Maybe some day. Just not today or for the foreseeable future.
- Google is not a search system. It’s an application platform. Search with the search box is just one application of the broader Google construct.
- Google will be lose its grip on search. As companies get larger, those companies lose their edge. This is happening to Google now. Look at how many of its services have no focus. Talk to a company that wants to get customer support. Google is losing its luster, and this means that the “next big thing” could come from a person who is Googley, just not working at Google.
So, Ms. Hane, what are we going to do with lame duck search solutions in a world dominated by a monopolistic supra national corporation that’s working on its digital arteriosclerosis. Dear reader, what do you say? Agree with me? Agree with Ms. Hane? Have another angle? Let me know.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2008
SharePoint without Microsoft: Alfresco’s Macho Move
August 4, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint is one of Microsoft’s most successful server products. I have heard that there somewhere between 65 and 100 million users. When I am stuck for a joke during a speech, I point out that there is an equal number of SharePoint consultants. One Microsoft wizard told me last year the Enterprise Search Summit West that SharePoint was content management, collaboration, and search.
I pointed out that the search system spawned an ecosystem of snap in products because the search was pretty awful. The document limit does not help too much either. Nevertheless, SharePoint is the answer to an information technology’s managers dreams. Sometimes, the dream becomes a nightmare, but that goes for most enterprise software.
Now SharePoint has a competitor. You can read a news release about this competitive product here. Alfresco Labs 3 can replace SharePoint, and you can download a version here.
Alfresco, according to the news release:
is the first ECM product to implement the SharePoint protocol and provides users with the same access from Microsoft Office, while giving companies the freedom of choice in their hardware, database, operating system, application server and portal products. Customers will experience the best of both worlds providing workers with an easy-to-use content management and collaboration tool that is integrated with Microsoft Office while lowering overall IT costs and increasing return on existing investments.
You can get more information about Alfresco and the SharePoint replacement at www.alfresco.com.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2008
Bamboo: Adding Flexibility to Microsoft SharePoint
August 4, 2008
The summer of ’08 may be known as the Summer of SharePoint. Bamboo Solutions here. The company has packaged its various SharePoint administrative tools, tossed in some new Web parts, and simplified its product line. Information Week has a useful description of this vendor’s controls and Web parts for SharePoint here.
In my opinion, SharePoint’s administrative tools are Byzantine. Bamboo’s engineers sat down and figured out how to smooth most of the rough edges in SharePoint. Functions such as routine administration to project management operations are easier. I find Bamboo’s marketing is a bit off center for me. For example, the Project Management Suite features more than a dozen Web Parts to help you manage SharePoint but the product name doesn’t tell me what’s in the bundle. Bamboo also offers a package of widgets to tame the password tiger. If you are not sure what you need, Bamboo will bundle all of its SharePoint gizmos in one package called “Ultimate Suite.” The package includes business intelligence tools, so you may not need Performance Point.
Bamboo offers administrative tools that should be in SharePoint but are not. Bamboo does not make its prices easy to find. You can buy the products here. The SharePoint components are worth a close look.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2008
Microsoft Demystified
August 4, 2008
Information Technology Sentinel ran an interesting essay on August 3, 2008. “The Poseidon Strategy: Seas of Internet Apps” is not focused on search, but it contains a number of interesting assertions. You can read the article by Techsentinel here. For me, the most interesting points in the analysis were:
- Microsoft uses its own tools to create its products
- If Microsoft is successful with WPF and XAML, the Internet Web page will become an “application based format”
- Google and Microsoft are in different businesses
Take a gander at Tech Sentinel. It’s a good mix of fact and speculation.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2008
Intel: Cloud Factoid
August 4, 2008
I tracked down an Intel presentation from 2006 and also used in 2007. The link is to ZDNet here. The presentation offers some interesting insights into Intel’s data center problem or opportunities in mid 2006; namely:
- Intel has 136 of these puppies with an average cost pegged in the $100 million to $200 million range
- Average idle capacity was about 200 million CPU hours with capacity at 900 million CPU hours, give or take a few hundred thousand hours
- In 2006, 62 percent of the 136 data centers were 10 years old or older.
- Plans in 2006 were to move to eight strategic hub centers.
My initial reaction to this 2006 presentation was that Intel’s zippy new chips might find a place in Intel’s own data centers. It would be interesting to calculate the cost of power across the old data centers with the aging chips versus the newer “green” chips. I expect that the money flying out the air conditioning duct is trivial to a giant like Intel.
More on this issue appeared in Data Center Knowledge in 2007 here. In 2007, according to Data Center Knowlege Google had about 93,000 servers in its data centers.
In April 2008, Travis Broughton, Intel, wrote here:
Our cost-cutting measures tend to be related to at least two of the three “R’s” – reducing what we consume, many times by reusing what we already have.
I’m not sure what this means in the context of the Cloud Two initiative, but I will keep poking around.
Stephen Arnold, August 4, 2008
Knol: A Google Geologic Hillock with an Interesting Core
August 3, 2008
I am heading to Illinois, and I vowed I would hit the road and post a comment upon arrival in America’s most scenic area: the prairie between Bloomington and Chillicothe, Illinois. Breathtaking. Almost as stunning as the discussion about Knol, Google’s alleged Wikipedia “killer”. Apophenia here weighs in with the “standing on the shoulders of giants” argument. The idea is that Google should have done more with Knol. For me the key point in his write up was:
What makes me most annoyed about Knol though is that it feels a bit icky. Wikipedia is a non-profit focused on creating a public good. Google is a for-profit entity with a lot of power in controlling where on the web people go. Knol content is produced by volunteers who contribute content for free so that Google can make money directly from ads and indirectly from search traffic. In return for ?
The challenge is valid if Knol were designed to generate revenue from ads. At the risk of being accused of recycling information that I have been speaking and writing about for six years, let remind myself that Google has a voracious hunger for information and data in any form. Knol fits into this Google-scape. I will return to this point after I refer you to iAppliance Web here. Bernard Cole’s “Google Knol Takes on Wikipedia’s Online Encyclopedia. The key point for me in this good article was:
Knol’s collaboration model is also more hierarchical. Article collaborators can suggest changes but cannot make them without the author’s approval. While this bottleneck may lead to Knol being less timely than Wikipedia, it should prevent the revision wars that plague controversial Wikipedia articles.
I absolutely agree that Google will get something for nothing when people contribute. A Knol article, as Mr. Cole notes, will have an “owner”, a person who has met some Googley criterion as an individual qualified to write a Knol essay.
Let’s step back. When I worked my way through Google’s patent documents and the publicly available technical papers here, I noticed that a great many of these Google writings refer to storage and data management systems that hold a wide range of metadata. Google wants data about the user’s context. Google wants data about user behavior. Google wants data from books in libraries. In its quest for data, Google has been the focal point of a firestorm about copyright. Google knows that for many queries, Wikipedia with its faults pops up at the top of various Google reports listing “important” sites.
Google is a publisher and has been for a long time. The company has a wide range of mechanisms to obtain “content” from users. With the purchase of JotSpot, Google gained access to a publishing system, not a Web log tool, but a system that allowed users to input specific items in a form. The resulting information is nicely structured and ready for additional Google massaging.
When I learned about Knol, my research gave me the foundation to see Knol as a typical Google Swiss Army knife play. Let me highlight a few of the functions that I noted. Keep in mind that Google keenly desires that a coal mine explosion under my log cabin in rural Kentucky explodes and coverts me to assorted quarks and leptons:
- Knol has an author, so Google can figure out that anything a Knol author posts has some degree of “quality”. Knowing the author, therefore, provides a hook to add a quality score to other writings by a Knol author. Google doesn’t have legions of subject matter experts. Knol provides a content source that can help with the “quality” scoring that Google does and sometimes in an unsatisfactory manner.
- Knol gives Google a hook to get copyrighted material that it owns, not some Jurassic publisher who sees Google as the cause of the pitiful condition of book, magazine, and journal publishers. Once a Knol author gets some content in the system and maybe a stroke from Google or a colleague, Katie, bar the door. I would publish my next monograph on Google in a heartbeat. The money would be okay if Google used its payment system to sell my work, but the visibility would be significant. In my business, visibility is reasonably important.
- Know gives Google a clump of information to analyze. Google wants to know the type of things that a company like Attensity or SAS can ferret out of text. These “nuggets” provide useful values to set threshold in other, separate or dependent processes within Google.
Notice that I did not focus on Wikipedia. Google, as I understand the company, floats serenely above the competition. The thrashings of companies threatened by Google are irrelevant to Google’s forward motion. I think Wikipedia needs some fixes, and I don’t think Knol will rush to do much more than what it is now doing. Knol is sitting there waiting to see if its “magnetism” is sufficiently strong to merit additional Google effort. If not, Knol’s history. If there is traffic, Google will over time nudge the service forward.
I also ignored the ad angle. Google’s patent documents contain scores of inventions for selling ads. There’s a game-based ad planning interface that to my knowledge remains behind closed doors. Everything Google does can have an ad stuck in it. So Knol may or may not have ads. Knol is not purpose built to sell more ads, but that’s an option for Google.
Based on my research, Google has a good sense of video content. Google has not figured out how to monetize it, but Google knows who makes hot videos, the traffic a hot video pulls, and similar metrics. Google knows similar data about Web logs. Now Google wants to know about individual authors’ willingness to generate original content and how the users will behave with regard to that content.
Scroll forward two years and think about Google as a primary publisher. Knol is one cog in a far larger exploration of the feasibility of Google’s becoming a combination of the old newspaper barons and the more financially frisky Robert Maxwells of the publishing world. Toss in a bit of motion picture studio and you have a new type of publishing company taking shape.
Granted Google Publishing may never come into being. Lawyers, Google’s own management, or a technical challenge from Jeff Bezos or a legal eagle could bring Googzilla down. But narrowing one’s view of Knol to a Wikipedia killer is not going to capture Knol, what it delivers, and where it may lead.
Knol is exciting for these reasons not because it is an ersatz Wikipedia. Okay, tell me I’m recycling old information, living in a dream world, or just plain wrong. Any of these is okay with me. Remember the disclaimer for this personal Web log.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2008
Vivisimo: Organizations Need a Search Strategy
August 3, 2008
Vivisimo, a company benefiting from the missteps of better known search vendors, has a new theme for its Fall sales push. Jerome Pesenti, chief scientist for Vivisimo, delivered a lecture called “Thinking Outside the (Search) Box”. The company issued a news release about the need for an organization to have an enterprise search strategy in order to prove the return on investment for a search system. What is remarkable is that–like Eric Schmidt’s opinions about how other companies should innovate here–scientists are providing consulting guidance. MBAs, accountants, and lawyers have long been the business gurus to whom challenged organizations turned for illumination. Now, a Ph.D. in math or a hard science provides the foundation for giving advice and counsel. Personally I think that scientists have a great deal to offer many of today’s befuddled executives. You will want to download the presentation here. You will have to register. I think that the company will use the names to follow up for marketing purposes, but no one has contacted me since I registered as Ben Kent, a name based on the names of beloved pets.
Is Vivisimo’s ROI Number Right?
For me the key point in the Vivisimo guidance is, and I am paraphrasing so your take may be different from mine, is that an organization needs to consider user needs when embarking on an enterprise search procurement. Mr. Pesenti reveals that the Vivisimo Velocity system saved Modine Manufacturing saved an estimated $3.5 million with a search strategy and the Vivisimo search system. You can learn more about Modine here. The company has about $1.8 billion in revenue in 2008, and it may punch through the $2.0 billion barrier in 2009. I know that savings are important, but when I calculated the percent of revenue the ROI yielded I got a small number. The payoff from search seems modest, but the $3.5 million is “large” in terms of the actual license fee and the estimated ROI. My thought is that if a mission critical system yields less than one percent return on investment, I would ask these questions:
- How much did the search system cost fully loaded; that is, staff time, consultants, license fees, and engineering?
- What’s the on going cost of maintaining and enhancing a search system; that is, when I project costs outwards for two years, a reasonable life for enterprise software in a fast moving application space, what is that cost?
- How can I get my money back? What I want as a non-scientific consultant and corporate executive is a “hard” number directly tied to revenue or significant savings? If I am running a $2.0 billion per year company, I need a number that does more than twiddle the least significant digits. I need hundreds of millions to keep my shareholder happy and my country club membership.
Enterprise search vendors continue to wrestle with the ROI (MBA speak for proving that spending X returns Y cash) for content processing. Philosophically search makes good business sense. In most organizations, an employee can’t do “work” unless he or she can find electronic mail, locate an invoice, or unearth the contract for a customer who balks at paying his bill. One measure of the ROI of search is Sue Feldman’s and her colleagues’ approach. Ms. Feldman, a pretty sharp thinker, focuses on time; that is, an employee who requires 10 minutes to locate a document rooting through paper folders costs the company 10 minutes worth of salary. Replace the paper with a search system from one of the hundreds of vendors selling information retrieval, and you can chop that 10 minutes down to one minute, maybe less.
This is the land of search costs. What’s your return on investment when you wade into this muck?
Problems with ROI for Utility Functions
The problem with any method of calculating ROI for a non-fungible service that incurs on going costs is that accounting systems don’t capture the costs. In the US government, costs are scattered hither and yon and not too many government executives work very hard to pull “total costs” together. In my experience, corporate cost analysis is somewhat similar. When I look at the costs reported by Amazon, I have a tough time figuring out how Mr. Bezos spends so little to build such a big online and search system. The costs are opaque to me, but I suppose MBA mavens can figure out what he spends.
The problem search, content processing, and text analytics vendors can’t solve is the value of investments in these complex information retrieval technologies. Even in tightly controlled, narrowly defined deployments of search systems, costs are tough to capture. Consider the investment special operations groups make in search systems. The cost is usually reported in a budget as the license fee, plus maintenance, and some hardware. The actual cost is unknown. Here’s why? How do you capture the staff cost for fixing a glitch in a system when the system must absolutely be online. That extraordinary cost disappears into a consulting or engineering budget. In some organizations, an engineer works overtime and bills the 16 hours to a project or maybe a broad category called “overtime”. Magnify this across a year of operations for a troubled search system and those costs exist but are often disassociated from the search system. Here’s why. The search system kills a network device due to a usage spike. The search system’s network infrastructure may be outsourced and the engineer records the time as “network troubleshooting.” The link to the search system is lost; therefore, the cost is not accrued to the search system.
In one search deployment, the first year operation cost was about $300,000. By the seventh year, the costs rose to $23.0 million. What’s the ROI on this installation? No one wants to gather the numbers and explain these costs. The standard operating procedure among vendors and licensees is to chop up the costs and push them under the rug.
SharePoint: Diagram of the Month
August 3, 2008
I am now collecting SharePoint diagrams. This classic comes from “SharePoint for BI Suggestion Topics”. Its author is Derek Comingore. The diagram and an explanatory write up appear in the August 1, 2008, SQLServer Magazine Web log. I have to confess that I don’t know what “BI suggestion topics” means. I can tell you that it looks pretty darned compllicated, which is a characteristic of most SharePoint diagrams.
This diagram is described as “the hamburger slide.” When I saw it, I thought of the Wendy’s tag line, “Where’s the beef?” What’s interesting is that my rework of the comparison tables published in Norm’s Performance Point Server Blog” does not mesh with this diagram, but I may be looking too hard for the all beef patty.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2008
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