Is IBM Reshaping Its Approach to Enterprise Search?
April 25, 2011
IBM is a mysterious and baffling outfit to me. One day I get a call from eager IBMers panting to find out what I know about the vendors in enterprise search. content processing, and semantics. Then weeks, maybe months go by, before an IBM person emails me a message like “We’ve been really busy” or “We don’t have a very big budget but maybe you could talk for free”. The classic IBM input I had this year is from a person who agreed to participate in a Search Wizards Speak interview via email. Months after the deadline, I was told an excuse similar to those I heard when I was a freshman in college and a classmate was explaining that his mother and dog died on the same day.
A better search or a more complex guitar? Source: http://www.heirloomradio.com/history.htm
Imagine my surprise when I received a link to a story from Yomiuri Online. “Natural Language Analysis Software, IBM Japan” contained what may be an compass reading about IBM’s enterprise search strategy. In a nutshell, IBM may be hooking together a content analytics component with the Lucene based OmniFind Enterprise Edition 9.1. Instead of offering what I can download from Apache or Lucid Imagination, IBM has grafted on text analytics.
The product, which becomes available on April 26, 2011, in Japan. IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search mashes up text mining software and information retrieval software. For good measure, IBM includes natural language analysis technology.
The other shocker, if the person translating the article was accurate, is that IBM will compete aggressively on price. I am not sure how IBM prices its products in Japan, but the software could, for all practical purposes be free. IBM makes its money on hardware and services with services becoming increasingly important in my opinion.
The product will handle social content, the unstructured data that plagues customer service operations, and email, among other source and file types. The system classifies content and outputs analytics, which may mean anything from a simple frequency count to a more elaborate SPSS type of function. If prices are indeed low, my hunch is that the SPSS type horsepower will not be present in full royal wedding regalia.
Some questions:
- Will this approach make IBM a bigger contender in enterprise search? No. IBM may be trying to carve a new niche for itself but Autonomy and Exalead are already there.
- Will this play explain the role of Watson or what IBM is doing with the dozens of analytics companies it has acquired? No.
- Is this a new trend in enterprise search? No.
- Will IBM continue to make sales to organizations who want to “go IBM”? Yep.
Vendors have been trying to distance themselves from the word “search” for years. In a sense, IBM is just late to the party. But with its financial resources and clout, tardiness may not matter.
Stephen E Arnold, April 25, 2011
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Protected: SharePoint Content and Editing Tips
April 25, 2011
PolySpot Names David Fischer Head of Research and Development
April 24, 2011
We learned last week that Polyspot, a vendor of search and content processing systems, named David Fischer to the post of director of research and development. As the firm’s chief technical officer, he will be responsible for the definition and implementation of technology policy solutions. Prior to joining Polyspot, Mr. Fischer worked at Apple and Business Objects. He is a graduate of ENST.
According to the company’s official announcement:
PolySpot is at a crucial stage in its development and is working to bring fundamental charges to its platform in order to continue to be a player in the search market and access to information ahead of its time and its competitors.
For more information about PolySpot, navigate to www.polyspot.com.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2011
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Google Plans For the Future
April 24, 2011
Larry Page, the new head of Google is planning some notable changes. According to the Datamation article “Google Under Larry Page: the Next Apple, or Next Yahoo?” these changes will determine Google’s direction.
Two of them stand out: 1) he’ll return Google to its start-up roots and 2) he’ll eliminate middle management and put engineers in control of the company.
It seems that the new CEO wants to focus on innovation but it’s clear that innovation alone does not make a company successful. The ever popular Apple brand has showed that effective execution is the way to the consumer’s heart. Though Google has had great ideas, due to poor planning, detailing, marketing or a combination many of their products have faltered once they reached the market. Engineers are a valuable asset to Google, but many of them may not see the big picture–product execution, not just innovation or ideas. Could Mr. Page be adding to the overall problem? We hope not.
April Holmes, April 24, 2011
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Fetch: Interesting View of Big Data
April 24, 2011
Our sister publication, Inteltrax, covers the world of data fusion, but we thought that Fetch’s stance on big data was appropriate for Beyond Search’s readers.
You may find Fetch Technologies’ Blog entry, “Bringing the Web to Big Data.” In it, Timo Kissel presents a useful point of view on the challenge of big data.
With all the talk about how to simply manage colossal amounts of data, ways to benefit from them can feel like an afterthought. Fetch puts the focus back on how we humans can make best use of Big Data:
But what’s more exciting to me is the use of this Big Data infrastructure to glean novel insights by using new approaches, algorithms, and analytics that simply weren’t feasible before. . . . This is another instance of using computers to do what they’re good at (tireless processing of large amounts of information) and using humans to do what we’re good at – pattern recognition, creativity and insight – albeit now at a scale that would be impossible for us to execute without these novel tools.
Kissel’s example involves retailers. Sure, they can continue to analyze sales from their own stores for trends. However, it would be so much better to open the whole Web, with global information about our products as marketed in different areas by different competitors. Immediately.
It seems that Fetch has some ideas on how to do that with the firm’s services, of course. But whether you go to them or not, this viewpoint represents a profitable way to approach what is now almost every organization’s new hurdle.
Cynthia Murrell April 24, 2011
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Autonomy Financials via a Mid Tier Consultant
April 23, 2011
In my email this morning, was a short item that pointed me to Autonomy’s 2011, first quarter financial results. I took a quick look at the top line revenues, multiplied by four and concluded:
- Autonomy has a better than even chance of breaking $1 billion in revenue before the end of its current fiscal year
- Autonomy was growing and rolling out new products and services, including an interesting medical and health product, other vendors of search were floundering (Google), giving away search as part of bundles and other deals (Microsoft, Oracle), struggling to be findable by potential customers (Thunderstone, a search vendor whose name is now used by a band and a game), or repositioning themselves to be something other than a vendor of enterprise search (Brainware for scanning, Coveo for customer support).
- Autonomy was reporting growth in its various of lines of business at a decent rate; 28 percent organic growth if I read the report correctly.
The story was ignored by most of the financial wizards who monitor search for the bottom tier and mid tier consulting firms. I read one “analysis” from an outfit called Gerson Lehrman Group which was written by a single individual but presented with a royal “we”. What struck me was that individuals seem happy pontificating about search, financials, and a darned complex technology using sentences that remind me of the rhetoric for the royal wedding. Wedding coverage has more substance than analyses of enterprise search I think.
In my new landscape of search study for Pandia.com, I analyze Autonomy, finding enough bone and gristle to fill 13 pages with technical goodies, comments, and critical evaluation of a company that blew past Convera, Delphes, Endeca, Entopia, Fast Search & Transfer, Powerset, Radar Networks, and a bunch of others.
If you want a free run down on what Autonomy has been doing in the last two years, just do the query “Autonomy” in the search box on the splash page of this blog or click this link. We changed our search results display to make it easier for users to get a sense of search vendor activities. For the more timely information, click this link for my free Overflight “what’s happening” report.
Stephen E Arnold, April 23, 2011
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Will Google Be Buried Alive by Legal Eagle Outputs?
April 23, 2011
As Larry Page takes over as the CEO of Google, according to the Datamation article “Will Google Be Lawyered to Death?” Google is headed for a turbulent legal ride.
Google is facing calls for a mounting wave of lawsuits, investigations and other actions by grandstanding government agencies, lawmakers and attorneys general.
Google must address three main issues, abuse of search engine dominance, manipulation of search engine results and privacy. Currently the Department of Justice has launched a lawsuit to stop Google’s $700 million purchase of ITA Software as the Federal Trade Commission contemplates its next legal move against the company. Google who currently owns about 65% of the search engine market in the United States is being hit in all directions as European and even Swiss officials are waging war. Just as in the past with companies such as Microsoft, Google is running out of safety nets and it’s only a matter of time before they are forced to pay up.
With the loss of the Linux matter in Texas, Google might find itself under a large amount of legal eagle outputs.
April Holmes, April 23, 2011
Bing and Search Traffic: Up or Down?
April 23, 2011
Is Bing making market share headway against search giant Google or not?
ClickZ has posted “Yahoo, Bing Search Alliance Makes No Progress in March.” We’d been told Bing was doing well. Which is it? We’re as puzzled as others. The conclusions here are based on data from comScore. According to the article:
Measured by volume of searches, [Bing and partner Yahoo] lost 0.1 percentage points of share between them, month-over-month, while market leader Google grew its own share by 0.3 percentage points in the same period.
The article does go on to say, however, that Bing independently grew by 0.3 percent, which is the same increase touted for Google.
The cheerleaders for Bing hopped into Wikipedia’s edit function and added this table. Notice that the widely consulted online encyclopedia is reported by Experience Hitwise to have a 30 percent share.
Like so many other statistics, it all depends on how you choose to look at the numbers. We do find ourselves running queries on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Blekko, Exalead, and other systems.
Cynthia Murrell April 23, 2011
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Metadata Goes to Court
April 22, 2011
Ben Kerschberg at Forbes examines “Metadata, The Freedom of Information Act, and Government Hypocrisy.” At issue is whether government agencies, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, must provide all the metadata attached to documents.
A recent federal court case, National Day Laborer Organizing Network v. United States Immigration and Customers Enforcement Agency in the U.S. District Court for the South District of New York, supports the case for providing all electronically stored information (ESI). However, there’s a caveat for agencies that don’t routinely store this data in their own files. Regarding which types of information must be included, the Court stated:
The answer depends, in part, on the type of electronic record at issue (i.e., text record, e-mail, or spreadsheet) and on how the agency maintains its records. Some agencies may maintain only a printed or imaged document as the final or official version of a record. Others retain all records in native formats, which preserves much of the metadata. Electronic records may have migrated from one system to another, maintaining some metadata but not all. The best way I can answer the question is that metadata maintained by the agency as a part of an electronic record is presumptively producible under FOIA, unless the agency demonstrates that such metadata is not “’readily producible.
My interest here lies in the specification of searchable material: If the government’s stored records are searchable PDFs, the released version can’t be converted into an unsearchable image. However, one can use a third party solution such as PDF OCR.
See the Forbes piece for more information and analysis.
Cynthia Murrell April 22, 2011
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Enterprise Search Reaches Out to Video
April 22, 2011
Probably many of us are familiar with video in the workplace, but with limited applications like training. The next step is finding more ways to make video work for us, as stated in “Searching for Value: Overcoming the Challenges of Video in the Enterprise”.
The referenced article focuses on the obstacles associated with implementing video as a vehicle for knowledge sharing. Namely, the amount of bandwidth required to process videos can become a nightmare for ill-prepared companies and in turn disrupt other services. Even more importantly:
“A few reasons why video poses challenges go beyond bandwidth, but confront issues associated with ownership, archival and business value. Companies serious about video need to consider a few necessary additions to their search infrastructure…”
The author recommends these additions include enterprise search technology, digital asset management and hosted video solutions.
There are a number of outfits who have already been successfully solving these problems. Exalead’s Voxalead and Autonomy’s Virage systems can both process video, making it searchable and providing an expansive toolset to the user. Even Cisco recently announced including video search capabilities in its TelePresence package. So no need to reinvent the wheel on this one; jumping on the latest corporate trend can be easier than ever before. Or should I say more robust?
Sarah Rogers, April 22, 2011
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