Oracle SES11 in Beta
October 3, 2009
Oracle has put some wood behind its Secure Enterprise Search product. The current version is SES10.1.8 G. You can download this system at this Oracle link. I learned from one of my two or three readers that Oracle has moved SES11 into beta mode. The product manager of the beta is Stefan Buchta. If you want to test the system, you can obtain his email address and more information at this Oracle link.
As I was getting up to speed, I noticed that Oracle had available a new white paper, dated January 2009. The addled goose was ashamed of himself. He missed this document in his routine scan of the Oracle Overflight reports.
After downloading the white paper “Secure Enterprise Search Version 10.1.8.4”, the addled goose noticed some interesting items; to wit:
The white paper reports “sub second query performance”. My question was, “What’s the index size, refresh and query load, and system infrastructure? Throwing hardware at a performance problem is often a way to resolve performance issues, and my hunch is that SES10g can be a computational glutton.
Second, among the enhancements listed was “security”. Hmm. Security has been a feature since version 9i as I recall. I wonder how security has been improved because the “full security” for search requires the licensing of the Oracle security server which may no longer be required, but somehow I doubt that Oracle has bundled this component with the plain vanilla SES10g product.
Third, SES10g seems to use the word “repository” in concert with the phrase “Oracle 10g database”. My recollection is that the “database” can be prone to certain Oracle bottlenecks related to intensive disc reads. Performance, therefore, is easy to talk about but may be expensive to deliver. But since we have not tested this most recent build, maybe the bottlenecks have been resolved. I have heard that Oracle is a Google partner and that some of the applications folks at Oracle are using the Google Search Appliance, not SES10g. Maybe this is an aberration?
Fourth, the crawler can handled structured and unstructured data. I know that SES10g can deal with structured data. That is a core competency of Oracle. I am not 100 percent that the unstructured data challenge has been fully met. Customers want hybrid content systems and the market is heating up. Autonomy’s SPE is a challenger because the Oracle solution may not be the home run that the white paper suggests. Autonomy is quite savvy when it comes to exploiting opportunities created by large players who don’t deliver fully on the market collaterals’ assertions.
Fifth, connectors get more attention. The list of connectors on page 25 of the white paper seems to lag what’s offered by the Lucid Imagination open source search system and is even farther behind connectors available from Coveo, Exalead, and others in the search and content processing sector. Surprisingly, connectors for MicroStrategy (close to Clarabridge), Business Objects (SAP and Inxight), and Cognos (IBM) have been removed. Well, that’s one way to get Oracle shops to adopt Oracle’s in house and acquired business intelligence components.
The white paper concludes with a snapshot of the AT Kearney knowledge portal. EDS bought AT Kearney and then the partners of AT Kearney bought the firm from EDS in 2005. Since that time, AT Kearney has been chugging along. It ranks among the blue chip consulting firms and is still working to meet the lofty goals set forth by Andrew Thomas Kearney in 1929. I wonder if Oracle is an AT Kearney client. I will have to check.
The knowledge portal interface reminded me of the Clearwell Systems, Coveo, and Exalead interfaces by the way.
In short, the white paper struck me as a modest update to the previous Oracle white papers. I did not see a reference to the vertical vocabularies that were once available for Oracle content processing systems. The architecture did not strike me as significantly different. Performance gains probably come from using Intel’s multi core processors and the larger memory space enabled with 64 bit support.
Take a look. I have no pricing data at this time.
Stephen Arnold, October 3, 2009
Newspapers and Fat
October 3, 2009
On a podcast, a commentator pointed out that TechDirt took a tough stance toward traditional publishing. I thought TechDirt was much less critical than the addled goose. Of course, TechDirt has more readers and it is a much more professional operation than this Harrod’s Creek marketing publication.
I read “Perhaps the Real Problem with Newspapers Is All that Extra Overhead” and found the write up in line with my views. For me one of the most interesting points in the article was:
In investigating further, he discovered that the paper only had six reporters — despite a staff of 59 people. And, yes, obviously many of those other roles are important — the editors, the printers, etc. But, at some point you have to question the claim that the “reporting” is so expensive. It certainly looks like there’s an awful lot of overhead and inefficiency built into the system. And that’s why newer news startups are able to succeed — because they don’t have that extra legacy layer of fat to deal with.
Let me offer one observation not included in the TechDirt article.
The premise of most newspapers, magazines, and book publishers is that their business model is sound and, despite economic and demographic changes, will serve the companies well. As long as the perception is that the consumer of information will pay for that information, publishing is likely to face consistent profit pressure. When I commuted from Silver Spring to Crystal City in 1979 I would buy a newspaper. In fact, many people on the Metro had a newspaper. When I rode the Metro last week, a few people had a free newspaper and a couple had a copy of the Washington Post. I had my trusty netbook with current info.
I try to understand why publishers believe that an iTunes for news will have a significant impact on newspapers. Keep in mind I agree with the “fat” argument. And I think my business model point amplifies the magnitude of the challenge publishers face.
Google is working on smart software. Individuals are punching out information, shooting pictures, and capturing videos. With smart software assembling info based on traffic or other signals, won’t the machine generated news be good enough? I think it will be for me. I subscribe to four traditional newspapers, and I find myself spending less and less time with these publications each day. The reason is that the info I need is fresher and more easily available from online sources. In fact, I dropped my subscription to the Financial Times because I found the content increasingly irrelevant to my information needs. Little wonder that the most recent promotion for a full year at the rate of $49 went directly into the trash can. I never considered subscribing.
See. I am more harsh than TechDirt.
Stephen Arnold, October 3, 2009
Yahoo: Clouds or Fog
October 2, 2009
I found Steve Shankland’s “How Yahoo Is Betting Its Cloud Will Pay Off” a useful look at what Yahoo wants to be—someday. Unlike the frou frou in the Hewlett Packard “analysis” of mainframe computers, Mr. Shankland reports what Yahoo wizard Shelton Shugar, Yahoo’s senior vice president of cloud computing, explained in one or more conversations with Mr. Shankland. Several points struck me as interesting:
First, the focus and investment in cloud computing is aimed at some tough Yahoo problems. Here’s the statement that sums up this point:
although rebuilding Yahoo on its own cloud-computing foundation is expected to save some money, the primary motivation is to liberate the company’s programmers from the difficulties and drudgery of coding for gargantuan audience on the Internet.
The wording suggested to me cost control and a step toward reducing the work and rework method that has kept Yahoo from leveraging certain revenue opportunities.
Second, I found the reference to multi-tenancy fascinating. The passage I noted says:
it’s [the Yahoo cloud] got a variety of interfaces that many Yahoo services can use–a concept often called multitenancy–so they don’t have to build them on their own. For another, it’s global, handling thorny issues such as operating at large scale and replicating data for reliability and responsiveness. And it’s got a degree of elasticity built in, so the infrastructure can expand, contract, or otherwise adjust to changing work load demands.
Multi tenancy is the technology that Salesforce.com has worked hard to tame and even harder to drive patent applications on its systems and methods into the ever efficient USPTO. I must admit I never thought of Yahoo operating a multi tenant system. I think that’s because Yahoo kept services separate in silos. Whatever was going on across silos was mostly a mystery to me. Within silos, my research suggested a fruit cake of solutions. Salesforce.com, bless its heart, is more homogeneous even though its dark heart pulses in tune with Oracle reads and writes.
Finally, Yahoo had performance problems and judging from this statement Yahoo still has performance problems. This is the passage I marked:
We need to be able to tweak it [Yahoo’s virtualization implementation] quite a bit for performance, to match it with our hardware,” Shugar said.
When I access Yahoo mail from outside the US, I have to deal with multiple time outs. In my opinion, the latency makes Yahoo unusable from some of the fine places I work. Even more annoying is the hit and miss results from Yahoo’s email search system. Once a week, the system reports I have no matches for my email queries. Not too good since I pay for a premium Yahoo service.
I hope Yahoo moves from “as is” to a platform that works better for me. My thought is that Yahoo is years behind in infrastructure, and if the economy goes south, cash will be tight and the job won’t be completed. If that happens, Yahoo adds to its already significant handicap.
Stephen Arnold, October 2, 2009
Google Is Winning the Game of Web Search Monopoly
October 2, 2009
Lots of posts flapping in the datasphere about Google’s market share growth. After reading a baker’s dozen of these I concluded that most of the pundits wanted Bing.com to give the Google a black eye. A good write up is eWeek’s “Microsoft Bing U.S. Search Share Falls, Sparking Google’s Gain”. The numbers are easy to summarize: Bing.com down below a nine percent Web search share. Google’s share is in the 80 percent range. I think Google’s share is higher, but my sources deny me license to use their names. No problem. Who is going to squabble when a company has a JP Morgan style market share. What’s amazing to me is that Google is getting sued left and right, and the company keeps on expanding its market share. In my opinion, 80 percent is a big chunk of available eyeballs. If Google decides to do whatever it wants and ignores the legal eagles, any action to shut down Google is probably going to annoy some people – a lot.
Stephen Arnold, October 2, 2009
Intelligenx Profiled in CIO
October 2, 2009
A happy quack to the Intelligenx team. The write up in the Spanish language CIO was a PR coup for this Washington, DC area company. You can read the story “La Base de Datos no es el Futuro de los Datos” in Spanish here or in English via Google Translate. Intelligenx delivers blistering performance. The profile said:
Un muy importante Banco Latinoamericano, no llamó por que tenía una amenaza latente de seguridad, el tiempo de indexación de sus logs de todo un día era de 11 horas, utilizaban un servidor de 4 procesadores y 4 Gb de ram. Nosotros tomamos los datos los colocamos en una notebook con 2Gb de ram e indexamos todo en 20 minutos. Se podrán imaginar que no es posible brindar seguridad a un sistema con una demora de 11 horas para saber que ocurre en mis logs. Otro caso similar ocurrió con una empresa de telecomunicaciones que necesitaba guardar los registros de llamadas durante 30 días y estos registros sumaban 30 billones de registros, Cuando tenían un requerimiento judicial para buscar un dato específico en su base, le llevaba mas de 24 horas encontrar un dato y recibían mas de 30 requerimientos judiciales al mes…Otro caso interesante en el que confluyen la capacidad de Search con las capacidades de interoperabilidad de nuestro producto se dio en el Ministerio de Justicia de Brasil, con cinco regiones y cientos de juzgados que tenían plataformas y sistemas diferentes y consultar jurisprudencia era una tarea imposible. Con nuestro producto generamos una capa de interoperabilidad que se adapta a todas y cada una de las plataformas de cada juzgado y disponibilizamos cualquier documento en tiempos que no superan los 150 milisegundos.
A flap of the wings to the Zubair and Iqbal Talib.
Stephen Arnold, October 2, 2009
Analyst Underestimates Impact of Microsoft and Google in Enterprise Search
October 2, 2009
I have written a report for the Gilbane Group and think highly of the firm’s analysis. However, a recent news item forwarded to me by a reader of this Web log triggered some conversation in Harrod’s Creek today. The article was “Competition among Search Vendors,” and it was dated in early August 2009. The article included this assertion:
This additional news item indicates that Microsoft is still trying to get their search strategy straightened out with another new acquisition, Applied Discovery Selects Microsoft FAST for Advanced E-Discovery Document Search. E-discovery is a hot market in legal, life sciences and financial verticals but firms like ISYS, Recommind, Temis, and ZyLab are already doing well in that arena. It will take a lot of effort to displace those leaders, even if Microsoft is the contender. Enterprises are looking for point solutions to business problems, not just large vendors with a boatload of poorly differentiated products.
In the last three months, I have noticed an increase in the marketing activity from quite a few enterprise search and content processing vendors. One one hand, there are SharePoint surfers. These are vendors who don’t want to be an enterprise solution. The vendors are content to license their technology to some of the 100 million SharePoint licensees. Forget search. SharePoint is a market that can be harvested.
On the other hand, there are vendors in the process of changing their stripes, and not just once. Some companies have moved from intelligence applications to marketing to sentiment to call center applications. I have to tell you. I don’t know if some of these companies are even in the search business any more.
Looming over the entire sector are the shadows of Google and Microsoft. Each has a different strategy for sucking revenue blood from the other. Smaller vendors are going to need agility to avoid getting hurt when these two semi-clueless giants rampage across the enterprise to do battle to one another.
The notion that niches will support the more than 300 companies in the search and content processing market may be optimistic. I wanted to use a screen shot from the TV show Fantasy Island but I won’t. A number of search vendors are gasping for oxygen now. I am keen to keep a sunny outlook on life. But when it comes to search and content processing realism is useful. Just ask some of the musical chair executives making the rounds among the search and content processing companies.
What will Google and Microsoft do to get shelf space in the enterprise? What do big companies with deep pockets typically do? Smaller companies can’t stay in this winner take all game.
Stephen Arnold, October 2, 2009
The Seed 2020 Meet Up in Louisville
October 1, 2009
I try to avoid visibility in Louisville, Kentucky. Two of the ArnoldIT.com team and I attended a meet up in Louisville and noticed two things: most of the presenters looked like members of the Norwegian men’s bobsled team and there were not minorities giving talks. Arpan Patel and I then attended a meet up in Washington, DC, the following week. Same experience. This time it was the Swedish men’s hockey team giving talks. What’s wrong with this picture, we asked. The answer was that the events did not have any women-owned or minority-owned businesses and start ups on the program. That struck me and my colleagues as weirdly out of phase with the Obama administration and its efforts to promote diversity and openness.
I concluded that ArnoldIT.com should step forward and make an attempt to showcase women-owned and minority-owned businesses. I decided to fund the event and put two of my top performing geese on the job. The result is Seed2020, a free meet up focused exclusively on showcasing interesting women-owned and minority-owned businesses. The purpose of the meet up is to make contacts, learn about companies, and advance the Obama administration’s vision.
This meet up is on for November 4, 2009. Doors open at the Muhammad Ali Center at 6 pm and everyone is out of the building before 9:01 pm. The program consists of 10 presentations by owners / founders of women owned and minority owned businesses. You can get details at the Web site we set up for the event. The site went live this morning, and we will be adding content as we march toward the event.
The meet up wranglers are members of the ArnoldIT.com team. Constance Ard, a law librarian who has been working as a project manager for ArnoldIT.com for more than a year.
Constance Ard, MLS
And co wrangler is Keisha Mabry, MBA, and a recent graduate of the University of Louisville.
Keisha Mabry, MBA
We have confirmed some folks to give talks; for example, Emeka Akaezuwa, whom we interviewed for our Search Wizards Speak series earlier this year. Dr. Akaezuwa lives in New Jersey and we thought that his giving a talk about his search software company would be useful to the Louisville crowd. He also founded a charity that provides books and computer training to children in Africa. You can read his biography here. Also on the program is Toni Steinhauer, who runs a successful programming and software development company in Louisville. Toni is a graduate of the Speed School’s engineering program. (One of the ArnoldIT.com is an advisor to the University of Louisville’s technology programs, and we have be a strong supporter of the engineering and computer science department’s intern program for many years.)
Emeka Akaezuwa, Gaviri Technologies Inc.
The Web site makes it easy for a woman-owned or minority-owned company to contact Constance and Keisha. Navigate to the “Propose a Talk” page and provide the information we need. We will follow up with you and discuss your submission. If you are not a woman or a minority, you can submit a presentation and we will place those in the pool of speakers.
Here are the details of the free meet up:
When
November 4, 6 pm to 9 pm
Where
Muhammad Ali Center, 114 N. Sixth Street
What
Presentations by local women owned and minority owned
businesses, a guest speaker, and networking opportunity
Why
There is not enough of this type of networking activity in
our opinion. And we want this event to be a way to
make business happen and get ideas flowing
among motivated individuals.
How
Sponsored by Stephen E. Arnold, ArnoldIT.com
Cost
None, free but registration strongly recommended
We do have a sponsor. The Louis T Roth & Co., P LLC, one of the largest regional accounting and professional services firms in the US stepped forward to support this free event. The former managing partner is usually skeptical of Stephen E. Arnold’s ideas, but he said, “This sounds like a great idea. We’re on board.” If you need accounting services in Kentucky or Indiana, ping the Roth outfit.
The organization of the program is designed to facilitate meeting people, networking, and having an opportunity to talk with the people giving six minute “elevator pitches” about their company or start up. Before the crowd is sent home, ArnoldIT.com has donated a new Zune HD which will be awarded to one of the attendees.
If this first program is a success, we want to talk with readers who may want to host a similar event in their city. For more information, navigate to TheSeed2020. Hope to see you at the event.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2009
Coveo’s New Enterprise Desktop Search System
October 1, 2009
I have been using Coveo’s products for years. I remember the first time I fired up the original desktop search program. I found the interface intuitive and the features in line with how I looked for information. I learned from the company yesterday (September 30, 2009) that a new version of the product is now available. I noticed that the company has added several new features to its Enterprise Desktop Search application; for example:
- Search of content on my netbook, my Outlook mail store, and other applications running in my Harrod’s Creek data center.
- A centralized index of all enterprise information, including the formerly risky and elusive, cross-enterprise PC and laptop content, which is useful when I am in a meeting and need a coding gosling to locate a particular item of information that I tucked away without telling anyone its location
- Enhanced monitoring functions.
After installing the application, you will want to check out the built in connectors, the faceted “point and click” search function, and the support for access from a BlackBerry device. Nifty indeed because RIM’s search function is not too useful in my opinion.
The president and founder Laurent Simoneau told me:
With our roots dating to the early days of Copernic, a global leader in consumer desktop search, we were committed to build the cross-enterprise capability to index and provide unified access for employees to their desktop content, including their email,” said Coveo CEO and President Laurent Simoneau, who prior to founding Coveo in 2005 was COO of Copernic. “What we’ve done is elevate that access to a higher level, with unified search of not only their individual PCs and laptops, but of contextually relevant knowledge and information residing in any enterprise system, based on IT permissions. In so doing, we’ve placed control over cross-enterprise desktop content indexing, with complete security and access permissions, in the hands of IT.
The benefits of the new system struck me as reducing the time spent hunting for email. Larger organizations will be able to reduces costs and risks as well.
The Coveo Enterprise Desktop Search application is powered by the Coveo Enterprise Search 6.0 platform, which is scalable from hundreds of thousands to billions of documents, and requires approximately 20 percent of the server footprint of legacy enterprise search solutions. Our tests show that Coveo is one of the more modular and scalable enterprise search solutions. It ranks as one of the easiest to install and configure search solutions we have tested. Worth a look. Fill out the form and give it a spin.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2009
Google Lifts Free Translation to a New Level
October 1, 2009
Here in Harrod’s Creek, a foreign language is a person who speaks with a New York accent. For other folks, a foreign language means information on a Web site presented in a language other than the one mummy and daddy spoke. Google has announced on its corporate Web log that Google’s quite good translation system has flexed its muscles. You should read the Google’s own words in “Translate Your Web Site with Google: Expand Your Audience Globally”. The basic idea is simple, but the scale and scope are Googley. The statement revealed:
Today, we’re happy to announce a new Web site translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site’s content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they’ll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor’s language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.
Nifty. Three comments:
- There may be some bugs in Google Apps that are getting hammered each day, but the Google is obviously prepared to direct some computational horsepower at translation of lots of stuff
- The Yahoo translation service looks like a 90 pound weakling and the for fee services are going to have to do some creating thinking. The Google can marginalize the market leaders in translation software with a bit flip in my opinion.
- The service unlocks content that has been mostly inaccessible to me. I am a happy goose.
The service is not perfect.
- Cnet points out that the service is a quick gist.
- Search Engine Journal reports that a user must paste a snippet of code in his / her Web site.
- Silicon Taps reveals that Google supports just 51 languages.
What about Microsoft? I suppose nifty graphics and more UX will be sufficient to close the gap between Bing.com and Google.com. Well, maybe not close the gap that much.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2009
Autonomy Responds to Structured Data Specialists
October 1, 2009
When I was writing the Gilbane report called Beyond Search, I was surprised by the number of vendors who were doing the structured-unstructured data do-si-do. Some of the companies were anchored in search (Attivio); others in data mining (Clarabridge); and others in transformation and extraction (Relegence). Big outfits like Microsoft Fast ESP promised to provide access to a range of content and add business intelligence to the mix. My head was spinning. I was, therefore, not surprised to read about Autonomy’s entrance into this market sector. You can read about Autonomy SPE and Free Your Data on the Autonomy Web site. At this time (October 2009), Autonomy SPE is in beta. You can sign up for the beta program here. Autonomy has posted a podcast with Mike Lynch as well. Oh, SPE is an acronym for structured probability engine.
Stephen Arnold, October 1, 2009
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