Sinequa: Embedded Search Deal with SGT
January 14, 2009
Sinequa, the French information access company, signed a deal with SGT to embed Sinequa’s search system into VEDA. According to the news story in IT Backbones Computing News here:
SGT’s VEDA software suite offers workflow automation and media content management. The VEDA Search & Retrieve function supports creation of new content and allows users to find and reuse existing content. Users can retrieve media in natural language, using their own words and expressions. VEDA Search & Retrieve leverages Sinequa’s patented technology that combines semantic, linguistic, statistic and structured analyses, to provide the most relevant answers and to automatically generate related concepts including people, geographic locations, and related ideas.
The enterprise search sector is a good news and bad news generator. On one hand, some companies are reporting significant new business. Coveo, for example, alerted me to its strong December 2008. Others, like Surf Ray, appear to be facing some managerial and financial challenges. Sinequa appears to looking for opportunities that create revenues from embedded software deals.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Exalead Profile Now Available
January 14, 2009
The Enterprise Search Report is no more. Thank goodness. A good idea in 2003 when work on the first edition began, the tome became an antique. I wrote the first three editions. I don’t know who did the fourth. With the coming of the new year, the rights to the information in the Enterprise Search Reports, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions, came back to me. I will be creating profiles based on my research into more than 50 vendors. At its peak the ESR only contained 30 profiles.
The first profile in the new, free Beyond Search Report series–an analysis of Exalead–is now available on the ArnoldIT.com Web site here. It runs about 11 pages and includes information about Exalead’s search system. I have enough information for a supplement about Exalead’s newest technology, and I will try to get that posted in the next couple of weeks as well.
I will work through my files and publish a profile every week or two. I have not worked out the full publication schedule yet, but I will get that done once I become more familiar with the new format.
There is no charge for these analyses. If you find an error, or if there is something in a profile with which you don’t agree–use the comments section of this Web log to provide your ideas and facts. I try to deliver a zero error document, but I have been writing about companies for a long time. Changes occur frequently, so you may find some variance between what’s in my free report and what the company’s sales rep tells you tomorrow.
The new logo. The Beyond Search goose is a proud mommy. Tess, however, was annoyed. She wanted a canine to identify these free reports.
Keep in mind that some of the information I have about vendors will not appear in the profiles. If you want more information about a vendor, you can write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and ask for a price quote for a more detailed report. I try to track down pricing and patent information, for example, but I don’t put this information in these free profiles. I want to be helpful, but I don’t want to end up as a Wal*Mart greeter. I have to sell some proprietary reports to survive.
Part of my method is to give the vendor an opportunity to comment on my analyses. These profiles are objective, so a vendor may not agree with some of my points. That’s okay. I just don’t want to be sued by 20 somethings who take umbrage at a 65 year old’s view of a search or content processing company. What vendors say and what the software does are two very different things in my opinion.
The combination of the interviews in the Search Wizards Speak series plus this Web log plus the Beyond Search profiles with a nifty new logo makes it easy for a person interested in enterprise search to get smart without spending $1,000 or more for a report that is outdated the minute it becomes available.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Nexplore: Another Google Challenger
January 14, 2009
Nexplore Search here is a Web search system with some interesting functions. A reader alerted me to the firm’s sharp increase in Web traffic. I had looked at the system last year, and I wanted to revisit the Web search company’s service.
The company said:
It starts with Nexplore Search Redefined a visually engaging user friendly, interactive multi-media interface makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete.
The company indexes 50 billion Web pages. According to the company here, its system:
redefines the search experience. A visually engaging, user-friendly, multi-media interface makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete. Computer intelligence combined with human community fosters greater relevancy — in both search results and ad displays. Intuitive refinement tools and advanced personalization features make search faster, easier and more enjoyable for everyone — from Web newbies to average users to accomplished surfers.
My test queries returned useful results. For example, for “enterprise search” returned links to Vivisimo, Coveo, and Endeca as “sponsored results”, which is okay. The first hit–somewhat surprisingly was to Microsoft.com enterprise search page here, not to the Fast Search page here. The Fast Search page seems a bit spare these days, so Nexplore seems to have indexed the Microsoft page as the number one enterprise search hit. I find this surprising, but I don’t have a good enough feel for what Nexplore is doing to determine relevancy.
Nexplore results for the query “enterprise search”.
The interface provides hot links to suggested or related queries, a feature Nexplore calls “Pop Search”. The system includes a link to a “Wiki Search”, which is okay, but the number two result in the hit list is a Wikipedia link. The sponsored results contained a surprise. There was a direct link to Ontolica, a unit of Surf Ray. Surf Ray has been the subject of considerable speculation. In fact, if you run a query for “Surf Ray” from this page on the Beyond Search Web log, you can follow the conversation about the company’s various managerial and financial ills. Obviously someone paid to put the Ontolica ad on the Nexplore results page, so this cannot be an error. So0me of the firms in the Sponsor Results were equally interesting; for example, I don’t think too much about Abbrevity, Accenture, or EMC as big players in the enterprise search sector. But someone is paying to reach eyeballs for the query “enterprise search”. Two results struck me as peculiar in the main results list. First, the inclusion of the Enterprise Search Summit 2009. I heard the show attracted 60 paying customers, so the owner of the show must be working overtime to pump up the search engine optimization to get the program to appear among vendors of search systems. The second anomaly is the exclusion of Google and its Google Search Appliance. Odd. Google has more than 16,000 licensees of its enterprise search appliance, which puts it on an equal footing or slightly ahead of Autonomy, another company not in the results list.
One useful touch is that the results for a news search are run against the query in the query box. No annoying retyping required. The video link did not return a direct link to any videos on the Google Channel. Majority of the videos came from Blinkx, a company touting itself as the largest index of video content. The exclusion of Google may be due to Google, not Nexplore, however.
The image search in response to the query “enterprise search” was not useful. The illustrations did not include the images that I know are available on the Web sites of the leading vendors. For example, the Google search appliance pages include screen shots. Similar images may be found on the Web sites of Autonomy, Coveo, and Endeca, to name just three companies who make visual content available for potential buyers. The inclusion of the defunct Enterprise Search Report was an anomaly. More recent reports such as the Gilbane Beyond Search study and the Galatea Successful Enterprise Search Management were not included on the first page of the results. The image search for this test query was not useful to me. The blog search was not useful either. The majority of the links were not directly about enterprise search. Presumably, the Nexplore indexing system does not handle synonyms for “enterprise search” at this stage of the content processing subsystem’s development. I will monitor this function going forward. A similar statement may be made about enterprise search podcasts. The inclusion of enterprise networking in the results set requires me to listen to a podcast to determine if the information would be of interest to me. My hunch is that “enterprise search” as a podcast subject is too narrow to be of much indexing traction.
The company offers several search related services:
- MyCircle–an application agnostic social computing platform
- AdCircle–Ad creation and management tool
- HitLabel–contents, prizes, and tools for aspiring music stars
The company’s president and founder is Edward Mandel and Dion Hinchcliffe the chief technical officer. Mr. Mandel was in 2004 a distinguished as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Prior to Positive Software Systems, Mandel ran a successful technology consulting firm, IIT Consulting. Mr. Hinchcliffe served as president and chief technology officer of Alexandria, Virginia-based Hinchcliffe & Company, a premier Enterprise Web 2.0 consulting and advisory Firm.
has added a former Microsoft vice president (Rowland Hanson) to the firm’s advisory board.
Nexplore has stated that the company is attracting more than five million unique monthly visitors and that the search system ranks in the top 5,000 internationally ranked Web sites, based on Alexa data. You can read the news story here. The company is publicly traded under the symbol NXPC. Ask your broker to pull the data from the “Pink Sheet” listings. You can read the company’s 2008 financial news release here. I scanned the information on the three page document. Several points jumped out at me:
- The company describes itself as “a development stage company”. I interpreted this phrase that the firm will be seeking additional funding.
- The company’s net loses through June 2008 were about $17 million. Most of this money is probably due to the investment in the system and software
- Through June 30, 2008, the company generated almost $700,000 in revenues. The next financial statement will make it easier to determine how the present economic environment is affecting this company
The $64 question is, “Is Nexplore the next Google?” If you want to bet on Nexplore, contact the company here. I will add this search system to my watch list.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions
January 14, 2009
Dion Hinchcliffe has popped on my radar twice today. First, I wrote about his role as the chief technical officer at Web search at Nexplore. My newsreader then delivered “Eight Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009” here. Mr. Hinchcliffe has more confidence in Enterprise 2.0 than I do. I am concerned about Enterprise 1.0 organizations unable to survive. Pushing the troubled companies to embrace Web 2.0 technologies as a survival strategy is a stretch for me. Mr. Hinchcliffe’s angle is quite different from mine. You must read his essay. In this Web log article I want to comment about three of his eight predictions. Note: I am not picking on Mr. Hinchcliffe; I am focusing on three ideas.
First, he points out that communities will become a priority for most organizations. I am on the fence about social systems in organizations. I have two concerns.I think much of the “social software” trend is hype. More significantly, I remain cautious because it is not clear how companies can operate social software without increasing certain risks. Regulated organizations come to mind.
Second, the idea that information technology will be aligned is a good one. But I find that organizations under pressure often become more internally divisive. The information technology unit often becomes the pivot point for certain power struggles. The poorly performing division may be viewed as a time sink and left spinning in the wind. The high performance unit will demand and probably get additional support. The harmonization of technology with poorly defined or on-the-fly business processes is not going to occur in many troubled organizations. One can argue that culture and organizational behavior has more impact on alignment than any other factors. Sorry, I don’t see much progress. I do see quite a bit of consulting.
Third, Service Oriented Architectures will become more streamlined. One can’t argue with a statement with the word “more”. My view is that most of the SOA progress will be in getting the systems to work with less latency. I don’t think the code will become more compact or the methods more streamlined. Most of the SOA applications are works in progress. The gating factor will be the organization’s appetite to invest and the expertise of the information technology staff and consultants.
I think that one important technical shift will be eDiscovery. Mr. Hinchcliffe does not include that application. Litigation is not on the minds of the Web 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon riders. One legal and botched eDiscovery process will suck up any available IT dollars in 2009.
In short, I find the assertions Mr. Hinchcliffe advances as music to the ears of consultants and vendors of trendy applications. My view is that the financial problems in many companies will be increasing in the first six months of 2009. Perhaps the economy will bloom in the second half of 2009. But until there is a way to link return on investment to the services and systems Mr. Hinchcliffe describes, I don’t think his predictions will come true. Of the eight, I think two or three have a reasonable chance of gaining traction. The rest will remain the rosy tipped vision of a world designed for consultants and start ups.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Disturbing IT Fortune Telling
January 14, 2009
The ChannelInsider here ran disturbing article predicting 10 IT casualties. I can’t reproduce these. I will highlight three interesting predictions and offer one comment. The information comes from a survey, The author of the story may be Lawrence Walsh. The companies destined to fail have been identified by the survey participants.
One failure will be Salesforce.com. I find this interesting. the company has some unusual technical plumbing. If the leaky pipes hold together, Salesforce.com may survive 2009. If not, its multi tenant patents may have some magnetic appeal.
Another doomed outfit is VMWare. I think think this company is owned by EMC. EMC should hang in through 2009.
A third company on death watch is Sun Microsystems. No doubt the company is in a tizzy, but I think a buyer may come on the scene first.
The lack of search companies on the list illustrate the low profile of that enterprise sector. Check out the full list.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Yet Another Magic Quadrant. Sigh.
January 13, 2009
The notion of a magic quadrant originated with the Boston Consulting Group. The original notion was to depict products in a strategic concept. In the 1970s, BCG caught Booz, Allen & Hamilton (the pre break up version of this blue chip firm) was in a tizzy because the BCG people had a secret weapon that left our consultants looking out of touch. The secret weapon depicted an X and Y axis. The X axis showed market share and the Y axis the growth rate of the business. The idea was to group a firm’s products, technologies, people, or whatever the BCG consultant needed to categorize as a cash cow (complete with a cow picture), stars, dogs, and problems or questions. The client could see what to “milk” and what to shut down. The BCG team would analyze further but the BCG matrix was a good business use of stuff that every calculus student learns in the second day of class. BCG, like other blue chip firms, crunches numbers until those numbers howl for mercy. The analysis sits underneath the matrix. The brilliance of the BCG approach is that it allowed BCG to explain a strategy without having to show slide after slide of analysis; for example:
- Dog–Low market share, low market growth. Example: Search utilities like Outside In
- Cash cows–High market shares, low market growth. Example: IBM OmniFind
- Stars-High market share, high market growth. Example: Google Search Appliance
- Problems or question marks–Low market share, high market growth.Microsoft Live.com search.
Others jumped on the bandwagon. I don’t recall the Booz, Allen & Hamilton buzzword for its strategic map. I have a copy around here somewhere. My recollection is that the McKinsey version of the BCG matrix was that McKinsey had six cells, not four. I always thought of the children created from the BCG quadrant as the BCG matrix. Sloppy thinking, I know. But BCG’s Bruce Henderson was identified to me as the “evil genius” who put Booz, Allen and other blue chip consulting firms behind the eight ball for a period in the 1970s.
When I started paying attention to search and retrieval, an uninformed senior executive whom I am loath to identify, gave me a copy of a Gartner report with a “magic quadrant.” I remember thinking that the Gartner approach did not make much use of the type of analysis cranked out by the blue chip firms. Remember that the MBAs and assorted whiz kids manipulated hard data such as sales by region, product margin, legal costs, research and development expenditures, and the like as the foundation on which the BCG matrix stood. Not the Gartner analysis. My recollection is vivid. The data seemed soft. I was thinking that whoever generated a soft matrix at Booz, Allen or one of the other blue chip firms where I have labored as a rental would have met with considerable push back.
Applying the BCG matrix to a business sector known for project failures, cost overruns, user dissatisfaction, and marketing baloney was likely to create some vendors with noses out of joint. The pure numerics of the BCG matrix focused on a single company or an industry sector and had data behind it. One’s nose could be out of joint, but the data are the data. Subjective analyses are just that, subjective and inherently impressionistic. Sales data are sales data. One can argue about how the data were collected, but the numbers are what they are.
Imagine my surprise when I read the Forbes.com article “Auto0nomy Positioned in Top Players Quadrant in Radicati Group Magic Quadrant” here. I have no quibble with Autonomy being listed as a leading vendor. What struck me was that the Radicati Group seemed to have borrowed heavily from the Gartner magic quadrant, itself a borrowing from the original BCG matrix.
My thought was, “I wonder if Radicati is hooked up with Gartner?” In my opinion, we have a mini-boomlet in azure chipped consultants recycling ideas. In my opinion, I think these derivatives of the original BCG matrix should:
- State the data on which the rankings or recommendations were based
- Provide hard data, not impressions
- Offer links to fungible data.
Perhaps Beyond Search should cook up a multi-celled, hypercube and populate it with rankings of the more than 300 vendors in the search and content processing space? Perhaps Beyond Search should ignore the market realities and plug in little known systems as vendors who are poised to trample the giants like Autonomy and Google? I don’t think this type of exercise is much more than a publicity and marketing play.
A similar situation is evident in Gartner’s use of the Burton Group’s notion of a “superplatform” recast as a “megavendor”. See here.
Edith Wharton, the American novelist, said as I recall, “True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.” To revivify the flagging search and content processing sector, originality is needed. And quickly in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
Smartphones and Search
January 13, 2009
Verizon tapped Microsoft for mobile search. No surprise. Bell head companies have a difficult time understanding that Google has become for the 21st century what AT&T was for the 20th century. The change has taken place over the last 10 years. With Google’s increase in reach and brand, the telcos have drifted in the other direction. Google’s time to fail awaits the company. Based on my research, the GOOG has some salad days, months, and years ahead of it. The force that through the green fuse is a powerful concoction of its technology, business models, and customer base. Mobile devices are the future for certain types of computing functions. The mobile search sector may become a more important battleground than the telcos are willing to admit. Verizon, for example, finds the Microsoft solution ideal for its needs. For the moment let’s look at the data in “Smartphone to Be Primary Worldwide Internet Device by 2020, Experts Predict” here in Telecommunications Industry News.
The point for me in the write up was:
77% of respondents predicted that “the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020,” while 64% expected more advanced touchscreen and voice-activated controls in the smartphones of the future.
Let’s assume that this is true. What happens if Google becomes the dominant mobile search system service? Here are three ideas that crossed my mind as I walked the dogs across the park’s verge this rainy morning:
- Verizon may be the odd telco out which can cost it mobile customers. Forced to cut a deal with Google, Google may charge a premium, further burdening the Verizon balance sheet
- Competitors trying to catch Google in Web search must open another front. A two front war with Google may exhaust the competitors’ reserves. Failure in the Web is one thing. That market is maturing. The mobile market is where the action will be, so winning is essential. A loss to Google would strengthen an already strong Googzilla.
- Countries may be forced to prohibit or limit access to Google. If this occurs, Google gets status as a country. Not much chance for underfunded start ups to make much headway without government nurturing and protection.
Let’s assume Google goes out of business. Those Xooglers will just try to build another Google. That might be a positive development.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
Flash Flex Silverlight
January 13, 2009
Search engines often stumble when indexing certain content types. I avoid Flash, Flex, and Silverlight myself, but there are 20 somethings who want to make my browser work like the local movie theatre. Here in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, we are getting new films every week or so. Most are still black and white. But the Flash, Flex, and Silverlight crowd goes for color, sound, and the big screen. Well, I should say that Flash and Flex go for the big screen. Silverlight if the data presented by Rich Internet Application Statistics are correct. You can find the information here. The url is one that might be gone when you read this. The data point out that search vendors will be focusing on indexing Flash and Flex. Looking at the pie charts, the Adobe crowd has 90 percent penetration. Silverlight is chugging along in the 15 percent range. Well, the good news is that Microsoft Fast can probably index Silverlight content.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
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Competition in Web Search: From Where
January 13, 2009
EcommerceTimes.com ran “What Search Needs Is Healthy Competition” here. Miguel Salcido takes a swing at a topic that will be lofted to regulators’ like a badminton birdie. The regulators can see it coming and the birdie looks easy to hit. But some of those whacks will miss, others fly out of bounds, some strike the net, and a few may make it to the other side for another volley. Mr. Salcido concedes that Google “continues to … dominate” Web search. Most of the tracking and statistics services understate Google’s actual lead, but that is of academic interest only. With Microsoft Live.com search losing share and Yahoo floundering like a bass in a net tossed to the bottom of the boat, Google faces competition from:
- Ask.com. The service works well for school kids but doesn’t meet my needs
- Quaero.com. The European Google killer
- Vivisimo. A metasearch system?
Maybe the challenge will come from a search engine in China (Baidu) or Russia (Yandex)? What about one of the many start ups who contact me. I like MSE360, but the company has a low profile.
Mr. Salcido suggests that competition for Google “would most likely come from a Yahoo/Microsoft or Yahoo/News Corp. merger.”
I don’t agree. Google represents a construct that will be difficult to duplicate. The “competitors” with some savvy are finding ways to work around Google, in spite of Google, or with Google. Competing with Google–based on my monitoring of Ask, Microsoft, and Yahoo–seems to be difficult. The reasons include:
- Google has been beavering away for a decade. Now an outfit wants to catch up. Good luck. A leap frog over Google is a better bet than trying to amass the resources to duplicate Google.
- Google, like Apple, has evolved into a weird social brand. Google has zero in common with the average Web user, but people love the GOOG. Apple has a similar effect, but so far Apple has not shown much appetite for the Web search business.
- Google continues to innovate. For my Google and publishing report due out this spring I describe one of Google’s monetization innovations. Few know about Google’s potential for generating money from content using a different business model than traditional media companies use. This type of innovation is largely off the radar of most Google pundits.
I think competition would be useful. From my pond filled with coal mine runoff, I don’t see much of threat in the current crop of challengers identified by Mr. Salcido. Yahoo with anything is not going to have a significant impact on Google. Yahoo search does not work for me, although about 20 percent of the Web search traffic reaches Yahoo. The problem is that the lion’s share of the traffic–about 70 percent or so–goes to Google.
Leapfrog, not a compound of two weaker entities.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
Melzoo: Googzilla Killer or Googzilla Snack
January 13, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me the link to the Melzoo.com Web search site. I poked around and located on VNUnet an article providing an overview of the service. You can read “MelZoo Takes on Google with Split Screen Search here. The system is a metasearch engine like Ixquick.com and Vivisimo’s Clusty.com. The metasearch technology is not the hook for Melzoo. The company generates an image of the Web site. I first saw this type of preview when I reviewed Girafa.com for my column in Information World Review five, maybe six years ago. Melzoo asserts here:
This preview feature has an enormous impact on the ‘quality of traffic’ delivered to advertisers: the traditional search engines are offering typically only text as a teaser. Chances are that users who enjoy the luxury of a detailed thumbnail preview, will be a lot more selective in visiting the sites they are interested in. This results in a higher effectiveness of use. The chances of “conversion” (i.e. from hit to buy) is currently estimated 5 times higher than with traditional search engines.
I think the vertical metasearch available from Deb Web Technologies is more useful for my work. You can see one of the DWT vertical federated search systems here.
The VNU write up made me sit up and take notice with its inclusion of this assertion in its write up of Melzoo.com:
“MelZoo has improved the experience of browsing the Internet in a totally different way. For years people have used an old technique – text only – to browse the web. MelZoo has revolutionized the way users will browse the web,” said MelZoo chief executive Alex De Backer. “In addition MelZoo is a welcome novelty for the advertisers, as it offers higher quality visitors at a lower cost.”
There are some issues associated with metasearch. These include latency, being blocked, or having to pay the source of the hits for the privilege of using its results. I will keep my eye on Melzoo.com.
Stephen Arnold, January 12, 2009
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