The Future of Database
October 21, 2008
Every five years, some database gurus rendezvous to share ideas about the future of databases. This is a select group of wizards. This year the attendees included Eric Brewer (one of the founders of Inktomi), AnHai Doan (University of Wisconsin), and Michael Stonebraker (formerly CTO of Informix), among others. You can see the list of attendees here.
At this get together, the attendees give short talks, and then the group prepares a report. The report was available on October 19, 2008, at this link. The document is important, and it contains several points that I found suggestive. Let me highlight four and urge you to get the document and draw your own conclusions:
- Database and data management are at a turning point. Among the drivers are changes in architecture like cloud computing and the needs to deal with large amounts of data.
- Database will be looking outside its traditional boundaries. One example is Google’s MapReduce.
- Data collections, not databases, are increasingly important.
- The cloud, mobile, and virtual applications are game changers.
Summarizing an 11-page document in four dot points does not convey the substance of this report. The narrative and footnotes provide significant insight into the shift that is coming in database. Among those likely to be squeezed by this change are such vendors as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. And what company’s shadow fell across this conference? The GOOG. The report’s reference to MapReduce was neither a rhetorical flourish nor accidental.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2008
Accenture Redefines Enterprise Search
October 21, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to a white paper–a brief white paper–from Accenture. As you may know, Accenture is a consultancy spawned by an accounting firm. Unlike Price Waterhouse Coopers, Accenture has continued under its own electric motor and it has worked hard to rank among the McKinseys and the Booz, Allen & Hamiltons of the world. Accenture publishes essays and studies to buttress its position as a “thought leader”. I downloaded the paper “In Search of Answers: Enterprise Search and the High Performance Business” here. I did not pause in my goosely quest to ponder the jarring “in search of answers” or the oxymoronic “high performance business”. That’s standard consulting word smithing. I dived into the meat of the six page document. When you retain a High Street consulting firm, you get more than six pages. The white paper is an intellectual appetizer, not an entire meal. I assert that Accenture is delivering the information equivalent of low fat yogurt or “search lite”.
This is a watercress salad. Not too filling and probably not a meal for a lumberjack.
The most interesting aspect of the write up to me was what it did not contain. Accenture pauses briefly on the problem that exists in most organizations; namely, enterprise search is a source of dissatisfaction. The company’s pundits also bound happily over the pain points of cost, complexity, and deployment time. This addled goose assumed that these issues are understood and documented in the reports to paying customers.
What struck me was the the placement of “what lies ahead” before the “how does it work” discussion. Since I am on record as the person who first proclaimed that “search is broken” then “search is dead”, it came as a surprise that Accenture sought to educate me about the future of a not too lively business sector. I thought briefly of the Fast Search & Transfer tangle in Oslo, Norway; the case studies of failed search vendors such as Delphes and Entopia; and the growing number of search vendors gasping for oxygen. You can read about the TeezIR and SurfRay businesses in this Web log. In short, from giants like IBM and Oracle to smaller companies, enterprise search is a bit of a challenge for vendors and users alike.
A more substantive solution to information access in an organization delivers calories and longer-lasting satisfaction.
What did Accenture say about the future? I am not going to quote from the firm’s document. It is the consultants’ intellectual property. The gist is that the future of search is analytics and monitoring, sentiment analysis, and multimedia. These are subjects that I assume will provide answers to a high performance business.
In reality, the Accenture white paper contributes to the problem of enterprise search. A high performance business won’t be a high performance business if it loses sight of one simple point–employees need information to help them do their jobs better. Making an employee type a query and watch a video to get an answer is sillier than the band playing as the Titanic goes down.
If you thrive on consulting firm input, you will find the Accenture white paper food for thought. If you have a more discerning palate, you will look for a more substantial starter. The Accenture white paper about enterprise search is what I consider “search lite”. You are welcome to a different opinion. I want substance, not MBA floundering.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2008
Goose Quack: Microsoft Fast Ripples
October 20, 2008
I am sitting in a so so hotel in London, killing time before hitting the British Museum today (October 18, 2008). I woke up and jotted down some thoughts that surfaced before I guzzled my Orangina and allergy pill. I think I must have dreamed about Norwegian police in navy blue jackets bursting into the foyer of Microsoft Fast and asking politely to collect financial records and other information possibly germane to the alleged pre sell out financial chicanery. After I recorded my early morning ideas, I realized I did not record much about Microsoft Fast. The key points were about the possible ripples that would make other search vendor row boats bog and spin. A few might capsize forcing their occupants to dog paddle to keep their brain stuffed heads above water.
The ripples I identified were:
- Venture capital and angel investors get scared. The logic is little more than “if it could happen to a company like Fast Search & Transfer, might it happen with my search investment”. Some people with money are like sheep. Once the herd starts to move, the rest fall in line with a border collie handling the strays.
- Customers become cautious. Big organizations move slowly and some of the ones with the most success are quite conservative. Search vendors who don’t reveal their financial picture might be excluded from a procurement. Even when the vendors trot out their numbers, conservative outfits might not believe the data. Why should they if “the Google of the north” pulled some rabbits out of their tuque.
- Competitors hop on the Fast Search pony and whip the beast. I am already tired of the email and phone calls I have been getting about this alleged malfeasance. I don’t know what Fast Search did or did not do. I do know that if vendors offer “safe harbors” or special deals to protect a Fast Search customer, the issue gets clouded. We don’t have too many facts yet.
My suggestion to myself is that I seek other topics. Perhaps when more facts come to light I can get excited about this affair. Right now all I know is that if I woke up with fading memories of big people in navy outfits knocking on my door at 8 am, what must the Microsoft Fast people (past and present) be dreaming and thinking. Hopefully these folks sleep like babies, clear consciences, no worries, and visions of sleek geese flapping through the cloudless blue sky.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2008
Cloud Computing: What’s Required
October 20, 2008
Seeking Alpha ran a long analysis by Gregory Ness titled “Cloud Computing: What Are the Barriers to Entry and IT Diseconomies.” I thought the analysis was quite good. Not surprisingly, I had several thoughts occur to me, but I find it stimulating to read thoughtful work by an individual who approaches a subject in a helpful, informative way. You can find the full text here. The most useful portion of the write up for was the discussion of the infrastructure. The gap between Google and the also-rans in the Web search game boil down to plumbing. Mr. Ness understands its importance. I don’t agree with his assertion that we have entered “Infrastructure 2.0.” My view is that Google built on AltaVista.com’s experiences and applied itself to addressing fundamental issues such as file and record locks and unlocks, minimizing message overhead in massively parallel systems, and confronting the problems of traditional Codd database structures in its first year or two of existence. Since that time, Google has continued to make incremental improvements in its decade old system. Companies trying to catch Google are not going to get very far if those firms try to embrace Infrastructure 2.0 as more than a word envelope. Amazon–a company which seems to get more mileage from modest R&D and information technology investments than others–has made good progress, but I doubt that its engineering foundation is as robust as Google’s. But Google, like Amazon, can fall over as the recent Gmail outage proves. Nevertheless, plumbing is important. When I was wandering around Crete, I saw some ruins that we thousands of years old. Those ruins had terracotta water drains visible. Plumbing is old stuff. I don’t think archaeologists talk about “Plumbing 2.0.” Despite my dislike of the “2.0” reference, this is a good bit of work. A happy quack to Mr. Ness.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2008
Search in the Enterprise: Silly Putty
October 20, 2008
Reading the summaries of what people said or did not say at the Carnegie Mellon conference about search on October 17, 2008, left me confused. I am in London, and I had to rely on write ups by the capable David Needle for Internet News here, a couple of emails, and one hurried phone call to keep tabs on the program speakers’ thoughts.
What I took from these inputs was:
- Enterprise search is not yet too good. I like having my conclusions validated when I am thousands of miles away working with my co author Martin White. Our new study “Managing Successful Enterprise Search”, forthcoming from Galatea in November 2008 accepts this point of “not too good” as a given. We focus on what must be done to address the management shortcomings that are often more responsible than technology for search problems.
- Search continued to be used in different ways and with different meanings. The Googlers talk about finding information. Other speakers talked about locating experts or an individual who worked on a specific project. One word “search” is left fuzzy. Little wonder then that it was, based on the information I received in London, to know exactly what “flavor” of search is the one the speaker is using to explain a particular approach to these issues. It was clear to me that when high profile experts get tangled in definitional issues that users are left at out in the cold.
- Enterprise search, regardless of how one defines it, remains a tough problem. As many entrepreneurs and their sources of funding have discovered, enterprise search is leaving many users dissatisfied. An employee needs information to perform work. Problem is that “work” is somewhat fluid. Some employees need to answer a customer’s question about an invoice. That’s one type of search. Other employees need to get a document signed and want a police style “where is she” service. That’s another type of search. Other employees don’t search at all. These folks are sitting in a meeting and need information pushed to them germane to the task at hand. One system performing all of these functions quickly finds itself expensive to deploy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to support.
One attendee suggested to me that the answer to these problems was more sophisticated systems. My reaction to this is, “Maybe.” In tough economic times, organizations want systems that solve mission critical information problems in ways that make benefits clear, show payoffs from the money poured into search.
Good enough is no longer acceptable. The woes of Fast Search & Transfer in the 18 months leading up to its acquisition by Microsoft are a grim reminder that “traditional” approaches to enterprise information may not be sustainable. I will have to wait until I return to the US to gather more details of this meeting. As it stands on Saturday morning, October 18, 2008, enterprise search is moving quickly to an embedded function, wrapped in more useful enterprise applications, and destined to become one component in different types of information access options. In short, the take away for me from the conference inputs I have is that enterprise search is a bit of a dog’s breakfast.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2008
Recommind: Grabs Legal Hold
October 20, 2008
Recommind released its Insite Legal Hold solution today. This product bridges the gap between enterprise search and analytics.
Recommind’s Craig Carpenter states that Insite maps well with the current customer base of financial and professional service firms that are involved in heavily regulated, high knowledge users that are subject to mass litigation.
The release of this product during these financially strained times is viewed as a growth opportunity backed by a recently infusion of $7.5 million in private-equity funding.
So what makes Insite Legal Hold worth an investment in your company? First, it is an integrated solution – early risk assessment (ERA), preservation, hold/collection and processing. Second, you can reduce your litigation related costs and risks to some degree. Third, you can collect only what is needed and leave the rest to current company retention policy. Finally, you can proactively address retention and spoliation risks; that is, having an email changed.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of this product is the automated updates to current holds, though Mr. Carpenter said that in response to customer feedback, Recommind also included less sexy but still important features including filtering, deduping, near-duping, and e-mail-thread processing.
A few other benefits of Insite Legal Hold include:
- Collective selection based upon keyword, Boolean, and concept matching. This collective selection provides is more defensible than previous legal hold releases because the applied intelligence normalizes for related concepts and produces documents that yield more relevant data that is above and beyond reasonable as required by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
- Explore in Place Technology allows the indexing an return of light results into html for a sampling review which can them be used to apply concept searches and more to the fuller data sets.
- Multi-platform flexibility: allows enterprises with a legacy review platform to enhance data analytics yet still use its current system for production
- Built-in processing: filter, dedupe, near-dupe, and thread documents, thereby saving 70-80% of processing and review costs.
- Manages Multiple Holds.
- Reduces IT costs by providing a forensically sound copy of perceived
relevant data and holds it in a separate data store.
When asked about pricing Mr. Carpenter provided an overview of Recommind’s three-tiered licensing module.
- Annual license fee bases upon the number of custodians
- System sold outright to customers with existing infrastructures
- A La Carte for those customers who don’t have a huge litigation load but need to manage 1 or 2 cases per year.
Insite Legal Hold has a huge potential to reduce the costs and risks involved in e-discovery endeavors. The pain points of high costs at the collection and review stage make the automation of updates and concept and near-concept bases selection an attractive solution.
Recommind’s investment of private equity funds to get the word out about their solution in a time when more potential customers are struggling with the fall-out from a global financial crisis bodes well for the profit stream of this company. What is apparent with this solution is that the developers are starting to pay attention to the less-sexy parts of e-discovery work and spending time and money to provide solutions that help reduce costs and the collection and production stages of the e-discovery cycle.
Constance Ard, Answer Maven for Beyond Search, October 20, 2008
Boom Is Lowered Gently on Yahoo
October 20, 2008
Kara Swisher lowers the boom on Yahoo gently in “What Yahoo’s Looming Costs Cuts Actually Mean (Not as Many Layoffs as You Think), which appeared on October 17, 2008. The hook for the write up is Yahoo’s firing people. I won’t cite a number because whatever that number is it won’t mean as many as I think. With regards to Yahoo, I don’t think much about layoffs. These are inevitable, and regardless of what the company will do in the next three or four months, Yahoo’s sitting on a cost time bomb. Nuking employees won’t do much. If you are a believer in Yahoo, you will enjoy the new announcements cogently summarized by ReadWriteWeb here.
Here’s what my research has turned up.
Yahoo has numerous search systems, search licenses, search initiatives, and search technologies. Today it is desirable to have a less heterogeneous technical sandbox. Not at Yahoo. Overture has a primitive search system, which I could no longer find on the redesigned Yahoo site. No problem because traffic for Yahoo advertising seems to be stable or gently undulating like long slow waves in the moonlight. There are two “flavors” of email and search delivered from the Stata Labs acquisition. No problem. Since the acquisition of Stata Labs, I can find email in the Yahoo system. There’s the Web search. Again no problem it is neither better or worse than Google’s Web search but Google has carried the day for now. There’s Flickr search. There’s other search systems kicking around. One reader reminded me that Yahoo’s real shopping search is Kelkoo. More information here. You could fiddle with the InQuira powered help search system until recently. I like using it to locate “cancel service”. Give Help a whirl here. For a laugh look at this attempt to “improve” Yahoo help.
If I am happy with these different search systems in general, why do I think collectively these very same systems are Yahoo’s cost time bomb. Three reasons:
- It costs money to maintain different systems. Staff, consultants, hardware. The more an organization has, the more it must spend for information technology.
- Heterogeneous systems means staff are not easily interchangeable. This means that Yahoo has to either hire more consultants or live with hacks that may operate like small roadside improvised explosive devices. Yahoo doesn’t know when a fix is going to create a problem elsewhere. These are unbudgeted fixes until one goes pop. CFOs don’t like this type of pop.
- Adding a new feature or function means that Yahoo either has to pick a horse to ride, thus keeping other systems in a position of imposed obsolescence or find a wizard who can produce a fix that works across heterogeneous systems. If this path is followed, see item 2 above.
Yahoo is busy creating new, new things. The hard fact for Yahoo is that much of the underpinnings are old, old things. You don’t fix these problems by firing people. You fix these problems by facing the reality of the infrastructure and making even more difficult decisions about technology, actions, and services. Firing people is expedient, and it will grease the skids for whatever Yahoo’s current pet consultant company recommends. But these steps, like Ms. Swisher’s analysis, lowers the boom gently on a ship that is struggling with flawed engineering. The ship, gently reader, she is not sea worthy.
Stephen Arnold, October 21, 2008
Google India: Develop on Our Open Platform
October 19, 2008
You might think it’s baloney. The Googley ones really want India’s programmers to hop on the Google go kart and build applications. How do I know? I read Dr. Parsad Ram’s words here. The idea reminded me of Microsoft’s approach in the days of MS-DOS and the PC expansion. Now it’s Google’s platform and the chance for a big pay day, maybe a job working at Google. Anand Parthasarathy’s “Google Makes Open Offer to Indian Developers” summarizes the highlights of Dr. Ram’s pitch made during Google’s developer day in India. For me the best comment in the article was this statement attributed to Dr. Ram:
A third initiative in its efforts to create an open Web ecosystem revolves around the Open Social, a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for Web-based social network applications, developed by Google, MySpace and other social networks. Delegates took back a CD with the Open Social APIs to kickstart their ingenuity.
Dr. Ram appears to have been influenced by the Microsoft Zune’s marketing pitch. I still am not sure what a “social” was when Microsoft welcomed me to it. Dr. Ram does, and he pushes for an “open social”. The idea is a 21st century spin on Microsoft’s blandishments to learn Basic, then VisualBasic, and now VisualStudio.Net. Old story, new spinner.
Stephen Arnold, October 19, 2008
Yahoo Imposes Unilateral Profile Changes
October 19, 2008
I have a Yahoo email premium account. I have written before about killing Yahoo for fee services. Since I analyzed Yahoo’s email search system for a paying customer, I just left the account sitting in cyberspace. As part of the test, I created a custom news profile, slapped some sources on the page, and fiddled with the point and click color and layout functions. I check the site periodically to see what’s new. In the last year, the layout changed so an email link is sometimes hard to find. Eh, so what? Then there were new themes. None of which seemed particularly useful to my 64 year old eyes. Eh, so what? Then there was the sharp deterioration in the shopping search. Eh, so what? I did not pay much attention because Yahoo was morphing into a less and less relevant service for my needs.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that Slashdot posted another Yahoo change. You can read the original Slashdot snippet here, dated October 19, 2008. Yahoo explains what it did and why here. As far as I am concerned a free service can change any time it wants. For me, Yahoo’s fiddling around with open source, its Web log asking for help to improve its help, or this shift in profiles are irrelevant. This addled goose is not going to flap his wings or make a sound.
However, it seems that some users are annoyed with the blank profile delivered to them. I logged on and took a gander. Here’s what the new blank profile looks like:
Amazing. This blank layout is easier for me to read. I can even spot the tiny links to email at the top left hand corner of the display. I don’t care too much for the weird handling of USA Today content, but I skip that drivel regardless of color. The nice red of the stock market declines leaps out at me. Although not shown in the list of financial results is Yahoo’s share price at closing on October 17, 2008, at $12.90, down about $20 from Microsoft’s offer earlier this year. That delta of $20 speaks volumes about Yahoo.
The company is adrift. Grand stand plays like making everything open source won’t work. Even the helpful Yahooligan who reminded me that the real Yahoo shopping service is Kelkoo.com, not the big shopping search link on the splash page’s search box. You could have fooled me. I thought that when the main page’s search box’s shopping label was clicked, Yahoo would deliver the goods so the speak. Nope, that’s not the “real” service. I also pine for Mindset, a Yahoo experimental search service that was somewhat more helpful for me than the “real” search service. Mindset disappeared without warning in the last 12 months or so.
Google Apps and Microsoft Office
October 19, 2008
Who knows if this is 100 percent accurate? Not me. I read in Slashdot “Ballmer Admits Google Apps Are Biting into MS Office.” You can find the Slashdot story here. The source of the Slashdot story is here. My thought is that there may be some truth in the assertion. My point of view is substantiated by Seattle PI here.
Is collaboration the key difference? I think Google’s support for collaboration was a differentiator, but now there are options, including Microsoft’s Live services. Should Microsoft be worried about Google Apps? Sure, but the larger concern for Microsoft is that Google is bubbling up around and above Google on numerous fronts. These range from the jejune Android to the partners who are figuring out how to hook Google functions into the enterprise to the incrementally better Google Search Appliance. Say what you will about GSA. Google does not have the authorities seizing records at 8 am on a chilly morning. Check out the Slashdot post and share what you think is really happening between the GOOG and Mr. Redmond.
Stephen Arnold, October 19, 2008
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