ISYS Inks Deal with UK’s Solcara
June 27, 2008
After a wizard from the Australian National Police spoke highly of ISYS Search Software, I checked out Version 8 and named it a “vendor to watch” in my April 2008 study Beyond Search, which the Gilbane Group published. Today’s announcement (June 27, 2008) about its deal with Solcara gives the company additional presence in the United Kingdom. ITWeek, a very good source of information in my view, published Matthew Lake’s “Firms Team Up to Deliver Enhanced Enterprise Search Solution.” You can read the story here. The key point in the write up for me is:
SolSearch Indexer aims to deliver a comprehensive and cost-effective enterprise search solution, which combines federated search technology with an advanced indexing capability. According to Solcara, SolSearch Indexer benefits from an enhanced functional administrator interface, and can extract entities and concepts when indexing documents, web sites and databases. These entities and concepts can then be used to support more efficient navigation of indexed content.
I like the ISYS system because it makes it easy to create a custom index for a particular collection of content. No fuss. No muss. For the work that I do, I appreciate ISYS Search’s metatagging. In my tests, patent applications and technical papers pose some interesting challenges. ISYS performs with the best of a small group of systems that my team and I use on a consistent basis.
But the major point of the announcement for me was the pressure this move will bring on Autonomy, arguably one of the top two or three vendors of search in the world. Solcara is confident that its approach can meet the needs of customers who may be interested in an alternative solution. Solcara’s announcement will catch the attention of prospects and Autonomy, a firm able to direct laser-beam intensity marketing on the market.
I will monitor the Solcara search solution, say “Congrats!” to the ISYS team, and keep my eye on the response, if any, from Autonomy’s office in Cambridge.
Stephen Arnold, June 27, 2008
Microsoft Powerset: Is There a Role for Amazon?
June 27, 2008
On May 10, 2008, I offered some thoughts about Microsoft’s alleged interest in Powerset. You can find this bit of goose quacking here.
In case you missed the flurry of articles, essays, and opinion pieces, more rumors of a Microsoft Powerset tie up are in the wind. Matt Marshall ignited this story with his write up “Microsoft to Buy Semantic Search Engine Powerset for $100 Million Plus”. You must read this here. The most interesting statement in the essay is:
Google has generally dismissed Powerset’s semantic, or “natural language” approach as being only marginally interesting, even though Google has hired some semantic specialists to work on that approach in limited fashion.
My research for BearStearns last year revealed that Google has more than “some specialists” working on semantic issues. Alas, that document “Google’s Semantic Web: the Radical Change Coming to Search
and the Profound Implications to Yahoo! & Microsoft” is no longer easily available. There is some information about the work of Dr. Ramanathan Guha in my Google Version 2.0 study, but the publisher insists on charging people for the analysis of Dr. Guha’s five patent applications. Each of these comes at pieces of the semantic puzzle in quite innovative ways. If Dr. Guha’s name does not ring a bell, he worked on the documents that set forth the so-called Semantic Web.
So, Google is–according to this statement by Mr. Marshall not too keen on Powerset-style semantics. I agree, and I will get to the reasons in the Observations section of this essay.
The story triggered a wave of comments. You can find very useful link trails at Techmeme.com and Megite.com. The one essay you will want to read is Michael Arrington’s “Microsoft to Buy Powerset? Not Just Yet.” By the time you read this belated write up, there will be more information available. I enjoy Mr. Arrington’s writing, and his point about the Powerset user interface is dead accurate. We must remember that user’s are creatures of habit, and the user community seems to like type a couple of words, hitting the enter key, and accepting the first three or four Google results as pretty darn good.
Semantic technology is very important. Martin White and I are working on a new study, and at this point it appears that semantic technology is something that belongs out of site. Semantic technology can improve the results, but like my late grandmother’s girdle and garters, the direct experience is appropriate only for a select few. Semantic technology seems to share some similarities with this type of best-left-unseen experience from my childhood.
An Amazon Connection?
My interest in a Microsoft Powerset deal pivots around some information that I believe to have a kernel of truth buried in it. Earlier this year, I learned the Microsoft had a keen interest in Amazon’s database technology. Actually, the interest was not in the Oracle database that sites, like a black widow spider in the center of a Web, but in the wrapper that Amazon allegedly used to prevent direct access to the Oracle tables from creating some technical problems.
Amazon had ventured into new territory, tapping graduate students from the Netherlands, open source, specialist vendors, and internal Amazon wizards to build its present infrastructure. Amazon has apparently succeeded in creating a Google-like infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of Google’s own infrastructure. Amazon also has fewer engineers and more commercial sense than Google.
In the last 18 months, Amazon has pushed into cloud computing, Amazon Web services, and jump starting a wide range of start ups needful of a sugar daddy. I recently wrote about Zoomii.com, one innovator surfing on the Amazon Web services “wave”. You can read that essay here.
Microsoft needs a NASCAR engine for its online business. Microsoft is building data centers. But compared to Amazon and Google, Microsoft’s data centers are a couple of steps behind, based on my research work.
At one meeting in Seattle, I heard that Microsoft was “quite involved” with Amazon. When I probed the speaker for details, the engineer quickly changed the subject.
Powerset–if my sources are correct (which I often doubt)–is using Amazon Web services for some its processing. If true, we have an interesting possibility that Microsoft may be pulled into an even closer relationship with Amazon.
I am one of the people who thought that Microsoft would be better able to compete in the post-Google world if Microsoft bought Amazon. Now let me get to my thinking, and, as always, I invite comments. First, Microsoft would gain Amazon’s revenue and technical know how. Arguably these assets could provide a useful platform for a larger presence in the online world.
Second, Microsoft gains the cloud-based infrastructure that Amazon has up and running. From my point of view, this approach makes more sense than trying to whip Windows Server and SQL Server into shape. The Live.com services could run on Amazon or, alternatively, the whopping big Microsoft data centers could be used to provide more infrastructure for Amazon. An added benefit is that Microsoft–despite its spotty reputation for engineering–seem to me to be more disciplined than Amazon’s engineers. I have heard that Amazon pivots on teams that can be fed with a pizza. While good for the lone ranger programmers, the resulting code can be tough to troubleshoot. Each team can do what it needs to do to resolve a problem. The approach may be cheaper in the short run, but in my opinion, may create the risk of a cost time bomb. A problem can be tough to troubleshoot and then fix. Every minute of downtime translates to a loss in credibility or revenue.
SharePoint Life Saver… And It Is Free
June 27, 2008
If you love SharePoint but want to choke the life out of its native search features, take a deep breath and navigate to MSDN Web logs here and the article “Tuning SharePoint Search.” Ian Palangio earns a happy honk from the Beyond Search goose. He identifies a Microsoft document “SharePoint Search Evaluation Guide” and provides the magic page number which provides a starting point for some useful SharePoint search information. One useful example is forcing certain results to the top of a results list. He writes:
This allows administrators to define Best Bets for a specific keyword. For instance if somebody uses the search term “Leave” – then a best bet result that will be the top relevant one is the Leave Form. Keywords can also have Synonyms associated – so that Leave, Vacation, Holiday and Annual Leave all mean the same thing for search results.
Useful write up.
Stephen Arnold, June 27, 2008
Sirsi Dynix: Nudging Libraries toward Enterprise Search
June 27, 2008
Sirsi Dynix provides technology solutions to libraries. On June 25, 2008, Sirsi Dynix issued a news release that features a number of new features, including:
- Fuzzy search technology
- Improved search index updating
- Support for forthcoming community/social networking capabilities.
- such as user reviews, rankings and tagging and more in future releases.
One feature puzzled me. Sirsi Dynix asserts that it has a “search widget,” which provides a code snippet that can easily be cut and pasted in order to present an enterprise search box within existing Web pages. When I see the phrase “enterprise search” I do not think of library systems. Sirsi Dynix says that these functions will be available to users of the Sirsi Dynix online public access cataloging systems. Enterprise search systems have been, in my experience, segregated from enterprise search or behind-the-firewall search systems.
My recollection is that Sirsi Dynix uses technology from Brainware. An interview with one of Brainware’s senior managers appeared in ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak series. The description of the Brainware system is interesting because Brainware’s system pivots on pattern matching. You can read the interview here.
A number of search-centric vendors are adding collaboration and social functions, which is standard operating procedure in the search business. Each new trend gets “bolted on” to the basic engine. Some vendors’ systems have become quite complex, and it is not clear how collaborative and social functions will mesh with basic search functions.
Stephen Arnold, June 27, 2008
Google: Big Rice Machine
June 27, 2008
To say that Google is really big is like saying New York City is a little seaside village. It’s a complete oversimplification. Posted in a blog at Managed Networks, the following analogy helped me get a better handle on a number too large to comprehend. Think of a single piece of data as a grain of rice. Google cooks 20 Petabytes of rice a day. That’s enough rice for every person on the planet to have 1,600 bowls each of the white stuff for dinner. Now that’s a San Francisco treat. You can read the original rice analysis here.
Jess Bratcher, June 26, 2008
Oracle: Girding for A Niche War
June 26, 2008
Superplatforms like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and two or three other firms with big ambitions have been drifting in the last three or four months. Oracle, fresh from record profits, seems to be lining up an assault force to go after the insurance segment of the financial services industry.
Oracle acquired Skywire Software, according to an Oracle news release dated June 23, 2008 here. Oracle did not disclose the terms of the deal, and in its official statement said:
Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Skywire Software’s application software business. Skywire Software is a leading provider of insurance and document management business applications. With Skywire Software and the pending acquisition of AdminServer, Oracle is expected to accelerate the formation of the most complete software suite for the insurance enterprise to include Oracle’s database and middleware for technical infrastructure, Oracle applications to support general business and insurance-specific functionality, plus Skywire Software and AdminServer to further support insurance policy life cycle management. In addition, Skywire Software’s customer communication management and document automation capabilities will expand Oracle Enterprise Content Management.
Skywire makes “glue software”; that is middleware that hooks together people and information working for an insurance company. Some of Skywire’s products touch upon enterprise publishing, a domain that begs for a search-and-retrieval solution. The company also offers various analytic components, which brushes against the text analytics business. Agents, brokers, actuarial consultants, and employees use many different communication media, and the idea is to get a common system to minimize the inefficiency that is rampant in most insurance companies. You can learn more about Skywire’s content management, business process, and business intelligence systems here.
The company bought AdminServer in May 2008. This company provides management systems to help insurance companies herd ducks; that is, policies that could return more profit with better administrative tools to manage them. You can learn more about AdminServer here. Timothy Morgan does a good job summarizing the technical nightmare that many insurance companies face when trying to manage their policy data and then trying to figure out what opportunities or liabilities certain paper presents. (I know what you are thinking, “How can an insurance company not know about its policies?” The reason is that large carriers have dispersed and fragmented data sets, and most don’t have a way to look at the big picture quickly.)
These acquisitions add to the mind-boggling range of products and services already in the Oracle stable. When I read the announcement, several thoughts crossed my mind; specifically:
- Oracle, like IBM and Microsoft, seems to be moving toward offering tightly focused solutions that do not necessarily drag the Oracle database and Oracle applications along with them. My hunch is that these niche companies provide Oracle a way to call on a company and make a sale. An upsell to more Oracle products and services will come along later in the sales relationship. If this is true, Oracle’s overhead is going to go up. Most sales professionals with many products in their carpet bag sell what generates commissions. Specialty products require a dedicated sales force, and it may be tough to get high margins in a niche that other companies will sure chase.
- Confusion is likely to be an issue. Oracle’s marketing has, in my opinion, not done a good job of explaining what the company offers, the benefits of the often overlapping products, and how the different pieces of the Oracle puzzle fit together. Oracle runs the risk of diluting its brand and confusing its customers. IBM and Microsoft face this problem now, and I think both of these companies are better at marketing than Oracle.
- The price hikes that Oracle announced give the company room to negotiate. Intense pricing pressure is evident in the market, and I am not sure how niche products can priced to pay for the R&D, the marketing, and the sales work that is going to be needed to keep niche firms growing quickly. Niches run out of cash gas pretty quickly, and a cloud based solution seems a more practical way to address some of the wacky data management problems that shackle insurance companies.
Oracle has an opportunity to bundle search, analytics, and data management with Skyline’s and AdminServer’s products. The company has to prove that it can do more than collect niche companies the way my mom used to gather figurines of girls with flowers.
Agree? Disagree? Use the comment section to set me straight.
Stephen Arnold, June 27, 2006
X1 Extracts Search Patent
June 26, 2008
X1 Technologies in Pasadena, Calif., has been “innovating” (X1;’s word, not mine) search solutions since 2003. The company has patented an enterprise search solution touted to be quick and efficient that uses an advanced technique to find search results even as you’re typing your query. X1 calls the innovation “fast-as-you-type” search, and it narrows results as you keep typing. With this patent, X! wants to make their mark and assert themselves in the enterprise search market with their X1 Enterprise Search Suite. The suite searches over 400 applications file types across PCs and servers alike. The company has more patents pending, trying to build on this idea; the firm’s plan is to change how search is “done”, not just to make search faster. You can download 7,370,035, Methods and Systems for Search Indexing, here.
Jess Bratcher, June 26, 2008
Nstein: Finding Greener Pastures
June 26, 2008
Nstein Technologies scored huge in a signing a deal with Bonnier Magazine Group, one of the largest magazine publishing companies in the United States. You can read the Nstein news release here. Bonnier will use NStein’s content management products to digitize, sort, tag and spruce up all their online material and digital data assets, and NStein gets big business from the company that owns Time, Popular Science, and Parenting. Once a content processing company, Nstein is morphing into a solution for data problems. Will other search and content processing vendors follow. Beyond Search’s call: solutions will be easier to sell than search, a function that baffles some senior managers.
Jess Bratcher, June 26, 2008
IBM’s Vertical Search Engine for Research Papers: As Disappointing as IBM Planetwide Search
June 26, 2008
I want to pick up the thread of my discussion of IBM’s Planetwide search system. IBM offers a vertical search system for its research publications. If you are not familiar with this system, you can access it here http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/index.html.
The default search page features fields. I assume that IBM believes that anyone looking for IBM research information feels comfortable with specifying authors, reports by geographic region, and the notion of narrowing a query to a title or abstract.
The first query I ran was “dataspace”, an approach to data management that dates from the 1990s. The query returned a null set just like my query for a WebFountain document on IBM Planetwide. No suggestions. No “did you mean”. No training wheels in the form of “See Also” references.
The second query was one of my favorites, programmable search engine. IBM did quite a bit of research related to this technical notion in 2004 to 2005. Again, a null set.
My third query is for Ramanathan Guha, one of the wizards involved in defining bits and pieces of the semantic Web. Again a null set. Zero hits. I was surprised by Ramanathan Guha worked at IBM Almaden before he went to Google and promptly filed five patents on the same day in 2005.
My fourth query was for “Semantic Web.” I was not too hopeful. I was zero for three in the basic query department. The system generated a page of results.
When I scanned this list, I noticed three quirks:
- I could not figure out the relevance logic in this list. The first hit does not have “semantic web” in its title but the phrase appears in the abstract. The date is 2005. The paper references the Semantic Web, yet its focus is on two IBM-emmy notions, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM).
- Newer documents appeared deep in the result list; for example, Kamal Bhattacharya, Cagdas Gerede, Richard Hull, Rong Liu, Jianwen Su (2007). “Towards formal analysis of artifact-centric business process models” in RC24282. I could not find a way to sort by date.
- A document that I thought was relevant was even deeper in the result list. The title, the abstract, and the paper itself evidenced numerous references to semantics and concepts germane to the query. After examining the paper, I wondered if the IBM system was putting the most relevant documents at the foot of the results list not the top. Furthermore, there were no 2008 documents on this subject, and I could not figure out exactly what was in this collection.
I clicked on the hot link for recent news. The most recent news was dated 2007 but the system offered me a hot link to 2008 news. I was expecting the news to be displayed in reverse chronological order with the most recent news at the head of the page and the older news at the foot. Nope. I clicked on the hot link for 2008 news and the system displayed this page:
At this point, I lost enthusiasm for running queries for papers from IBM research using the search system that one search pundit described to me as “quite good”.
I navigated to Google and entered this query: IBM Almaden research +”Ramanathan Guha”. Google responded in 0.23 seconds with 78 hits. The first three were:
My searching skills are not too good. I am getting old. I eat squirrel stew. My logo is a silly goose. I wear bunny rabbit ears before erudite audiences in New York. Nevertheless, the IBM search system for its research papers is not too useful. I will stick with Googzilla. IBM may want to try Google’s free custom search engine and at least deliver pretty good results instead of the disappointments I experienced. IBM-ers, agree or disagree? Search pundits weigh in. Maybe I am missing something. Time to go shoot squirrels with my water pistol. More productive than trying to find information with the IBM research vertical search engine.
Stephen Arnold, June 26, 2008
Business Objects: Number One in Business Intelligence… for Now
June 26, 2008
Business intelligence–along with content management and enterprise search–is a mid-sized blob of marketing mercury. The big names in the US are SPSS and SAS Institute. Both work hard to get colleges and universities to teach eager math students how to make these proprietary systems make data walk on their hind legs, roll over, and sit on command. Business Objects, a sales-oriented company, has made in roads into the SPSS and SAS client base and now the Gartner Group has named Business Objects as the number one business intelligence outfit.
You can read SearchDataManagement.com’s summary of the Gartner research here. You can read the Business Objects news release here. Let’s get to the meat of the Gartner study. For me this was the key point:
Combined, SAP and Business Objects controlled 26.3% of the global BI platform market in 2007, nearly double their nearest competitors. IBM and Cognos held 14.7% market share, followed by the SAS Institute at 14.5%.
So, “combined” makes Business Objects number one. Chop out the SAP part and Business Objects posts nearly $1.0 billion in revenues. Will Business Objects be able to maintain is revenues? Will the company be able to make Inxight Software into more than a content utility? Will superplatforms such as IBM. Microsoft, and Oracle bundle business intelligence with higher value systems sucking the air out of Business Objects’ growth?
For me, Business Objects means excellent sales management. Could its success come from the lack of marketing and sales management expertise, not its technology?
Stephen Arnold, June 26, 2008
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