IBM Acquires i2 Ltd.
September 1, 2011
IBM purchased i2 Group. Founded in 1990 by Mike Hunter, i2 is a widely used content processing and case management system for law enforcement and intelligence professionals. The company received the EuroIntel Golden Candle Award, for its contribution to the global intelligence community. On several occasions, the ArnoldIT team worked on some i2 products several years. The company has moved outside the somewhat narrow market for sophisticated intelligence analysis systems.
“IBM Acquiring I2 for Criminal Mastermind Software” reported:
IBM plans to fuse i2’s products with its own data collection, analysis and warehousing software. It will then offer packages based on this combinations to organizations looking to spot suspicious behavior within vast collections of data.
Not surprisingly, there has been considerable confusion about the company. Part of the reason is that the name “i2” was used by a back office and supply chain company. The firm benefited from its acquisition from the low profile Silver Lake Sununu. Silver Lake purchased i2 from Choicepoint in 2008 for about $185 million. “IBM Bolsters Big Data Security Credentials with i2 Buy” opines that the deal was worth more than $500 million, a fraction of what UK vendor Autonomy commanded from Hewlett Packard in August 2011.
i2’s technology is not well understood by those without direct experience using the firm’s pace setting products. One example in the Analyst’s Notebook, a system which allows multiple case details to be processed, analyzed, and displayed in a manner immediately familiar to law enforcement and intelligence professionals. i2 acquired Coplink, developed at an academic institution in Arizona.
The core technology continues to be enhanced. i2 now provides its system to organizations with an interest in analyzing data across time, via relationships, and with specialized numerical recipes.
My position is that I am not going to dive into the specific features and functions of the i2 system. If you want to know more about i2’s technology, you can visit the firm’s Web site at http://www.i2group.com/us. The Wikipedia page and many of the news and trade write ups about i2 are either incorrect or off by 20 degrees or more.
What will IBM “do” with the i2 technology? My hunch is that IBM will maintain the present market trajectory of i2 and expose the firm’s technology to IBM clients and prospects with specific security needs. Please, appreciate that the nature of the i2 technology is essentially the opposite of software available for more general purpose applications. My view is that IBM will probably continue to support the integration of i2 Clairty component with the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Like the descriptions of Autonomy’s technology, some of the write ups about i2 may require further verfication.
We have reported on the legal dust up about the i2 ANB file format and some friction between Palantir and i2 in Inteltrax. Most of the legal hassles appear to be worked out, but contention is certainly possible going forward.
I have been a fan of i2’s technology for many years. However, some firms have moved into different analytical approaches. In most cases, these new developments enhance the functionality of an i2 system. Today we are featuring an editorial by Tim Estes, founder of Digital Reasoning, a company that has moved “beyond i2.” You can read his views about the Autonomy deal in “Summer of Big Deals”. More information about Digital Reasoning is available at www.digitalreasoning.com. Digital Reasoning is a client of ArnoldIT, the publisher of this information service.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Canada Newswire and Endeca Team Up to Provide Intuitive Search
September 1, 2011
Canada Newswire and Endeca seem to be the model of a symbiotic relationship at the moment. PRNewswire reported on “Canada’s Most Popular News Release Website Undergoes Dramatic Transformation.”
News and search were made to go together: it only makes sense that these two popular organizations leading in their respective (and connected) fields would collaborate.
The new CNW Web site boasts a filtered search system that people can intuitively use and locate information. Additionally, search filters can be saved for the future and news releases can be organized into folders.
The article included the following assertion:
CNW is on the forefront of innovation in the media industry, offering news consumers an interactive user experience across all of their online content,” said John Andrews, vice president, marketing and product management at Endeca. Audiences are only becoming more sophisticated and online competition grows stronger. Endeca is the key to helping CNW set its web presence apart to be accessible for all users.
As long as they are mutually benefiting each other, Endeca and CNW will most likely continue to prosper even more. Finding news releases remains an interesting challenges. Many of these documents appear in high profile Web sites such as Forbes and Marketwatch and then are taken down or moved. Other services publish news releases, but these services often include a subset of the announcements. Here at Beyond Search we are in favor of better findability for these types of marketing and sometimes required documents.
Megan Feil, September 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Hlava on Indexing, Metadata, and Findability
September 1, 2011
On August 31, 2011, I spoke with Margie Hlava, president and co-founder of Access Innovations. The idea for a podcast grew out of our lunch chatter. I then brought her back to the ArnoldIT office and we recorded a conversation about the challenges of “after the fact” indexing. One of the key points surfacing in the interview is the importance of a specific work process required for developing an indexing approach. “Fire, ready, aim!” is a method which can undermine an otherwise effective search solution. In the podcast, Ms. Hlava makes three points:
- Today’s search systems are often making it difficult for users to locate exactly the information needed. Access Innovations’ software and services can change “search to found.”
- Support for standards is important. Once a controlled term list or other value adding indexing process has been implemented, Access Innovations makes it easy for clients to repurpose and move their metadata. Ms. Hlava said, “We are standards wonks.”
- Indexing and metadata are challenging tasks. On the surface, creating a word list looks easy. Errors in logic make locating information more difficult. Informed support and the right taxonomy management system is important. The Access Innovations’ solutions are available as cloud services or as on premises installations.
The challenge is that automated content processing without controlled term lists creates a wide range of problems for users.
You can listen to the podcast by navigating to http://arnoldit.com/podcasts/. For more information about Access Innovations, point your browser to www.accessinn.com. Be sure to take a look at Access Innovations’ Web log, Taxodiary. Updated each day, the blog is at www.taxodiary.com
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Summer of Big Deals
September 1, 2011
Will These Blockbusters Affect Business Intelligence?
The summer has been a hot one, not in terms of temperature, but when measured on the acquisition thermometer. First, Oracle the sprawling database and enterprise applications company bought InQuira. Then, Google took one third of its cash and the equivalent of two years’ profit and bought Motorola Mobility. And Hewlett Packard, one of the icon’s of the Silicon Valley way, spent $10 billion on its surprise purchase of Autonomy plc.
Business intelligence, intellectual property, and information management turned up the heat for investors and those tracking active market sectors. The market interest is high and many think these deals are likely to sustain their energy. But I don’t see it that way. I think the deals are more like dumping charcoal starter on charcoal briquettes: Very dramatic at ignition but certain to cool and fade into the fabric of day-to-day activity.
Starting a charcoal fire can produce some initial pyrotechnics. These fade quickly.
As the founder of Digital Reasoning, a company focused on delivering the next-generation solution-based on entity oriented analytics, I see these deals from the perspective of working with customers to solve big data analytics challenges. First, let me give you my view of information management and traditional business analytics and then outline where I think the technology and the market are going.
Business intelligence in general and analytics particular are now verbal noise. I know that most of the professionals with whom I speak interpret the phrase “business intelligence” in terms of their own experiences in getting information to make a decision. For some, business intelligence is a report and follow up telephone conversation with a human expert. Don’t get me wrong, consultants and advisors often do great work, but my point is that the phrase “business intelligence” is anchored in a method of information analysis rooted in human behavior unchanged since our ancestors sat around the camp fire roasting meat on sticks.,
The word analytics is equally difficult to explain. For many of our clients, analytics means SAS or SPSS (both the bread and butter of traditional statistics courses and business analysts from banking to warehouse management).
Attensity: to Tweet or Not to Tweet, That Is The Question
September 1, 2011
Social media seems to be the solution to everyone’s problems these days. Even if your tweets don’t actually solve any issues, at least you can get something off your chest. Contact Center Solutions Community reported on how companies can take back the upper hand in their article, “Customer Service Trends: Monitoring and Responding to Social Media Conversations.”
While consumers see their status updates as mere complaints or topics of conversation amongst Facebook friends, Attensity sees this as unstructured data that they can help other companies extract insights from and eventually act based on the analysis.
The article taught us the following about the inner-workings of Attensity’s Analyze and Respond Solutions:
This is done through text analytics capable of feats like analyzing the entire Twitter “fire hose” (fed into the Attensity system as an API) in real time. Analyze 6, Attensity’s latest release, includes a feature called ‘hot spotting,’ which identifies trending conversations as they’re happening, tracks “normal” volume, and alerts companies when that volume goes hot or cold.
What happens when negative tweets about the company who is trying to prevent complaints on social media start infiltrating the “firehose”? Our view is that the “fire hose” is looking more and more like a stream that only a handful of companies can make available and process.
Maybe Nathan Wehner knows?
Megan Feil, September 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Indexing FileNet from SharePoint
September 1, 2011
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
