Desperate Times for Search and Selling Consulting
December 22, 2011
I saw a news story about the uptick in the housing market. Perhaps you read “Get Started ‘On’ Dec. 21: Housing Shows Recovery Signs, Lobbyists Warn against Tax Cut Expiration.” You may have seen the recent story “Home Foreclosures Jump in Third Quarter-Report.” Contradictions are one indicator which tells me that no clear signal is emerging. I wrote last night (December 20, 2011) about the Oracle financial softening and how search acquisitions will not do much, if anything, to firm up Oracle’s revenues. Since the economic meltdown became evident in the spring of 2008 with the collapse of BearStearns, we have entered a new financial territory. The maps are still being created and exploration is underway.
Most organizations are struggling to find a way to accomplish two difficult goals simultaneously. Personally I cannot multi-task, but the financial pressure is so great that many executives assume that more effort will pull the marshmallows out of the bonfire. I am not so sure.
One goal for many organizations with which I am familiar is to keep existing revenues from eroding more quickly. Since I focus on software and content, the challenge of generating new revenue from old products is a big one. Most of the executives whom I know are hard working, optimistic people. But the issues is preventing revenue from existing and reasonably well understood products and services from tanking.
The “big idea” will touch you, imparting “wisdom” and more.
The other goal is for organizations to find new revenue. The MBA types have fancy diagrams to explain strategies and tactics. I have worked out a few basic options which have worked for me when I had a “real” job (not as an azure chip consulting, journalist, or middle school teacher). Here are my non MBA options:
- Buy a company and pretend that its products and services are “new”
- Take an existing product and service, reposition or repackage it, and target a “new” market with this “new” product. Nothing material is done, but the marketing copy changes.
- Identify an existing product or service and graft something “novel” like making a search system into an iPad app or some equivalent maneuver. The “new” product is then pitched as “revolutionary” or whatever claim common sense and one’s attorney permits.
- Make a bet on something outside of one’s core competency. Believe me, this happens frequently. Examples include some of Google’s products to a local catering service’s attempt to set up a full service restaurant.
In this context of financial pressure, the need for r3evenues, and the options available to executives, I pondered “The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why” by Mark Suster, a member of the Dark Side; that is, venture capital world. The foundation of his write up was a presentation by the azurist George Colony, the CEO of Forrester Research.
I don’t have much to say about the specifics of either the Forrester notion that certain digital resources increase over time; specifically, storage, processing cycles, and network capacity. I don’t have much to say about the Dark Side analysis of the Forrester presentation.
Here’s what interests me:
First, I think these big, well publicized “thought pieces” are essentially devoid of substantive analysis. The “big idea” becomes a foundation upon which assertions, arguments, and counter arguments rest. The goal is to associated Forrester with a topic and generate buzz, visibility, or what is called a “conversation” about the “big idea”. I don’t have the energy to explain why the three “resources” are essentially one “thing.” Believe the assertion if you wish
Is Kantar Clueless: Online Ad Spending Going Down?
December 21, 2011
Data about ad spending is tricky for me. Those collecting the data can make decisions which may have a significant impact on how the numbers flow. I am suspicious of information from the “real” research firms and well as from outfits which are less familiar to me. Hey, we do data analysis too, and some data are slippery fish.
Against this disclaimer, check out “Kantar Media Reports Paid Search Spend Tumbled in 2011.” I found this passage interesting:
Kantar first observed the drop in spending from financial, legal and medical marketers around the end of the first quarter – and the drop continued right through Q3. Swallen said, “I don’t know if it reflects a variance in ad impressions vs. variance in keyword pricing. I can’t comment which of those two factors is more responsible for the declines, but the decline is primarily coming off those financial services.” Overall, Internet ad spending rose narrowly by 2.8 percent for the first nine months of 2011. Total advertising spending in the U.S. grew modestly from January to September, then slowed to a crawl in the third quarter. Third quarter ad spending was up just .4 percent compared to last year, capping a nine-month period that saw growth of just 1.5 percent. The total amount of ad sending for the first three quarters of 2011 was $104.7 billion.
So no big deal, right?
Wrong. If Google sucks in the easy money, the competition has to up its game. If Google plays hard ball and cuts its prices, there will be some new burger flippers practicing their wrist motion at Burger King.
Assume the numbers are off base. Google gets bigger, and it is quite plausible that it will spend its way to an even stronger market position. Worth watching. Ad spending up or down? We will know more in 2012.
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Continued Growth Expectations for Text-Analytics Markets
December 21, 2011
It is no doubt text-analytics demand is skyrocketing. From brand management to competitive intelligence, businesses recognize the numerous and valuable applications for the software and services that turn business data into information gold. Seth Grimes breaks down the market outlook and a variety of text analytics components in, “Text-Analytics Demand Approaches $1 Billion.”
Grimes reports software and service text-analytics revenues at $835 million globally. While Grimes’ analysis comes to us from his 2010 market study, it is good to know the historical growth as we look at 2012 predictions. From the 2010 market study findings:
Growth is steepest for applications that seek business insight in social networks, online media, and surveys. Applications include brand-reputation management, market research, competitive intelligence, and customer service and support. For these applications and others, text analytics brings automated, natural-language processing techniques to bear to identify and extract names, facts, relationships, sentiment, and other information in blogs, forums, news, social updates, e-mail, and a range of enterprise sources.
Grimes predicts text-analytics markets will sustain healthy annual growth rates between 25 and 40 percent in each of the coming years with a continued shift from on-premise software to Web services. He also suggests the benefits of a third-party solution to plug into your existing system to lower initial costs, ease start-ups, and to access the service provider’s repository of social and online information.
A third party solution we like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Staying ahead of the curve, they have solutions for Enterprise search, information pairing, searching the cloud, and mobility. Daniel Fallmann, founder and managing director of Mindbreeze Solutions GmbH, comments on the product in “Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance is Trend-Setting Product 2011”:
“Our focus on agility, quality, usability and style in the monthly shipments of our latest product innovations enables us to integrate and implement client requests into our product development rapidly and sustainably. In addition to our on-premise offering, everyone can now try out our product in the Cloud, immediately. This is a possibility much appreciated by our clients and partners alike.”
Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze’s suite of solutions to see what works for you.
Philip West, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Are Worthy Vendors Excluded from Azure Chip Report?
December 21, 2011
The technology research company Gartner studies almost every area of information technology (IT). Recently they analyzed “MarketScope for Enterprise Search” and frankly, we found their rankings a little bit underwhelming. Gartner’s report included many of the companies with big names, but failed to include smaller, yet competitive search companies.
The scope of Gartner’s research was to examine “a group of generalist vendors, many of which our clients frequently ask about, which deliver simply priced, solid enterprise search functionality for common use cases.” This included the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Google, Mindbreeze and 4 other companies. Microsoft and Google came out on top with the highest ranking.
We find it interesting that Mindbreeze was analyzed, but comparable companies like Smartlogic, Surfray and Inforbix were left out. Borja Santaolalla seemed to be scratching his head too. On his blog, he says that it:
“[d]oesn’t resemble market reality, well…..no sponsorship = not included in report.”
We agree. It is disappointing that they did not analyze the smaller companies and rank them on their merit. We think the results just might surprise those big names and many of the azure chip firms as well.
Jennifer Wensink, December 20, 2011
Can The David Huddle Slay The Microsoft Goliath?
December 21, 2011
In the early days of IT, it was downright stupid to take on Bill Gates and Microsoft, but there have been many Davids since then and they have slain Goliath multiple times. Another David has set his slingshot at putting an end to the mighty SharePoint 2010 enterprise: Huddle. Business Insider reports that, “This 32-Year-Old Entrepreneur Is Bent On Beating One Of Mircosoft’s Biggest Businesses.”
The youth in question is Andy McLoughlin and his slingshot is Huddle, a collaboration service. He claims that Microsoft is ready to topple:
“’There’s a huge amount of room to improve upon SharePoint as a content collaboration tool the enterprise. It’s sold as free software, yet any CIO who has tried (and failed) to implement it knows that it’s far too easy to spend many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting it ready for deployment. Users generally hate it and most licenses will never be deployed.’”
With Huddle deployed in over 100,000 businesses in 180 countries and available in fifteen languages, McLouglin is set off to be a quick competitor for the PC giant. He initially knew nothing about the market, but by creating software he, himself, would love to use and creating a brand around it, McLouglin has developed a loyal customer base. It’s simple logic, but other brands can’t seem to grasp that. SurfRay is a brand that does understand the practically of good software and their technology for search and indexing is the best on the market.
Whitney Grace, December 21, 2011
Talend Pitches Holistic Integration
December 21, 2011
Connectors get some new lingo; holistic integration is a term we learned from Talend’s press release, “Talend V5: Democratizing Holistic Integration.” The company defends its coinage of the term:
Frankly, IT often uses loosely some terms from the general corpus. But in this case, holistic does the trick. . . . The promise of Talend v5 is to enable IT organizations to converge traditionally disparate integration efforts and practices through a common set of products, tools and best practices. When an organization deploys Talend v5, it will deploy essentially one platform, regardless of the integration need: data integration, application integration, process integration.
That does fit the definition of the term, but it is a little grand, don’t you think? Hmm, maybe not in a field titled “Big Data.”
Talend positions this release as the result of the changes its products have undergone since it bought the German Sopera this time last year. The company is quick to point out that this comprehensive approach does not result in bloatware. Each product included in the platform works independently; customers must only deploy the parts they need.
The write up emphasizes that Talend’s products are still based on the open source underpinnings on which they were founded. The company boasts of being a leader in the open source data management market.
Cynthia Murrell, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SearchBlox 6.4: Just in Time for the Holidays
December 21, 2011
SearchBlox announces, “SearchBlox Version 6.4 Released.” Important bug fixes make this a must-download for current users. For example, basic search will now work with foreign characters, and the problem indexing some MS Office docs has been overcome. However, the new features are more interesting. We learned from the write up:
SearchBlox can now automatically detect text files on the files system and index them irrespective of their file extensions. . . . You will now be able to use SearchBlox to search across repositories of text files such as source code files and log files.
The filename of the indexed document is now available as a separate tag <filename></filename> in the XML search results
Both additions are helpful, indeed.
SearchBlox is a provider of enterprise search solutions based on Apache Lucene. Over 300 customers in 30 countries use SearchBlox to power their Web site, Intranet and custom search. SearchBlox Software, Inc. was founded in 2003 with the aim to develop commercial search products based on Apache Lucene, which is turning up in solutions from Lucid Imagination to PolySpot.
Cynthia Murrell, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google and British Telecom
December 21, 2011
I remember when British Telecom was gaga over Google. Now, not so much. I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but I want to document “BT Sues Google in U.S. over Patent Infringement.” Here’s the quote I noted:
Florian Mueller, an IP analyst who has closely followed the twists and turns of patent litigation, said on his website that BT had become the fifth large publicly traded company to bring patent infringement litigation against Android. “With so many major patent holders asserting their rights, obligations to pay royalties may force Google to change its Android licensing model and pass royalties on to device makers,” he said.
Android business model? Hmmm.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
You Remember UIMA: LanugageWare and Translation Support
December 21, 2011
IBM has recently deployed a new natural language processing technology, as described on its “Content Analytics” page. LanguageWare is available only as a feature of IBM Content Analytics. The write up describes the addition:
“LanguageWare is used to develop Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) compliant custom information annotators. It also provides a highly optimized rules engine to help reduce development time. In combination with IBM Content Analytics version 2.2, LanguageWare may be used to:
- Develop and deploy custom text analytics for IBM Content Analytics that address industry-specific requirements.
- Easily create and add new facets into IBM Content Analytics rapid insight search and exploration user interface
- Develop lexical analysis for both deeper and new language support.”
Unstructured Information Management Architecture refers to an open and scalable platform for working with unstructured data. Though the concept began at IBM, it has since moved into the open source realm; Apache’s page on the project can be found here. IBM seems to be enthusiastic about open source. Is open source better, faster, cheaper than IBM’s own technologies?
It is almost the New Year. We wish the company would put these products online as robust demonstrations. We are disinclined to believe big company public relations, but we do believe our test queries and our hands on experiences. How about a New Year’s resolution from IBM to put these asserted technologies on display? Perhaps that “exposes” technology is a way that undermines public relations? PR may be safer than live demos in the real, wild 2012 world.
Cynthia Murrell, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Engine White Papers
December 20, 2011
Anyone looking for guidance in advance of starting a new search engine project, might want to take a look at these search engine white papers which I came across by chance the other day. Search Technologies is probably the most experienced company out there when it comes to implementing search engines, and these white papers, collectively, provide a pragmatic perspective on the search engine world. Titles include the provocative “Glass Box Approach to Enterprise Search” and “Making the Most of Search Navigators.” Worth a read if you’re into search engines. Recommended resource at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
