Oracle: Search Will Not Reverse the Downturn
December 20, 2011
The financial news about Oracle is typical bad news with the happy bunny hop. Navigate to “Oracle Falls Short on Weak Software Sales” or any of the stories reporting the financial basics. Here’s a taste of the December 2011 financial report:
The company reported a profit of 54 cents per share on $8.8 billion. The results fell short of the consensus view that Oracle would report sales of $9.23 billion and a per-share profit of 57 cents. Oracle shares, which had risen by 56 cents, or 2 percent, during the regular trading session, to close at $29.17, fell sharply in after-hours trading. As of 4:15 pm ET, Oracle shares were trading down $1.72, or 6 percent, on the news. In the plus column, Oracle said its operating margin on a non-GAAP basis improved to 45 percent, and that it expects those margins to keep rising. Operating cash flow grew by 45 percent, as well, to $13.1 billion.
Financial PR speak is tough to figure out. My hunch is that Oracle squeezed out costs to pump up the profit. Going forward Oracle has to do better. Once the downturn takes hold, it costs a lot of money to reverse the slide. Maybe Oracle will work magic with search? The company now owns and has to pump support and research resources into:
- Secure Enterprise Search or SES11g
- Triple Hop, if it still is around
- Endeca, the $1.1 billion bundle of MBA inspired search applied to ecommerce, the enterprise, business intelligence, and just about any other niche the B-School brigade can identify
- RightNow, a content and search service for customer support which, as you know, I interpret as “methods for preventing a customer to communicate with an informed human”
- InQuira, the blend of two search firms which is in the natural language processing game as applied to customer support. See item 4 above
- Oracle’s structured query language which is the database administrators’ favorite method of locating an item within an Oracle table.
The role of search at Oracle is to drive services, customization, opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, and “synergies”.
Will search provide a stream of significant revenue stream for Oracle? No. The deterioration of traditional database revenue, in my opinion, is part of a structural shift in computing. The search acquisitions make it easy for the 1,000 new sales professionals to get appointments, but a meeting is not a sale. Oracle’s hardware business may make Endeca-powered systems run with more speed, but will Endeca’s customers opt for an Oracle server or bite the bullet and look for an alternative like Lucid Imagination, PolySpot, or some other open source centric search solution? Endeca touts its analytics, but based on our work, next generation analytics vendors like Digital Reasoning make Endeca’s methods look a little like a 1998 Buick next to a 2012 Ferrari 458 Italia Spider.
Search will help, just nor deliver a gusher of cash. Search is not the answer to Oracle’s revenue challenges. I hope I am wrong. So do our customers who are dependent on Oracle and looking at options which appear to cost less.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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Harsh Words for SharePoint Server 2010
December 20, 2011
Microsoft SharePoint users could hardly contain their excitement when the company announced they would be releasing SharePoint Server 2010. There were some lofty expectations for this upgrade, but it seems many users were left dissatisfied with the improvements and innovations that they found. Bjorn Furuknap, one of the disgruntled users, took to his blog to discuss where he thinks Microsoft went wrong.
Furuknap says in his post, SharePoint Server 2010 Isn’t Really Ready for Enterprise Applications – And What Microsoft Should Do About It, that SharePoint 2010 is:
“riddled with bugs that prevent it from being a great platform for building enterprise or professional applications.” He blames the “lousy” coding for many of the problems and says that the product “lacks virtually everything that makes it sellable, including the price.”
Furuknap says that Microsoft “isn’t able to move quickly enough to compete with much more agile and nimble companies” and we must add that his analogy of an elderly person wearing hip-hop clothes conjured up some funny images.
So the question is… can a start up company beat Sharepoint? It certainly seems that way. Companies like Box.net and Inforbix are offering the enhancements that users are looking for. These companies are simplifying the process, enhancing the reliability and making their product cost-efficient. Watch out because this time David just make take out Goliath.
Jennifer Wensink, December 20, 2011
SharePoint Ranks High on New Enterprise Search Markertscope
December 20, 2011
We pay attention to Forbes Market Watches and other business reports for a basic understanding of what goes on with Internet search and enterprise systems. We also know that if you have enough change dangling around in your pocket, you can persuade the report generators to make yourself more favorable. We prefer to pay attention to lesser-known and more reliable services like Gartner, to provide us with the truth. Gartner recently wrote a “Marketscope for Enterprise Search” that will help you determine which is the best enterprise search platform. The biggest discussion between businesses and vendors is what is the best way to find information from numerous sources.
Gartner reviewed the most common search enterprise systems that can be deployed for any business type. SharePoint users can rejoice, because out of the eight systems tested, only Microsoft and Google got the highest ranks. Ignoring Google for the moment, here are its strengths:
• “Microsoft’s broad product line beyond search makes it attractive for projects that have a larger footprint.
• It is particularly strong at transparently revealing the logical elements that lead to a particular result being returned to users.
• It has invested significantly in federation as a means of broadening search, while seeking to preserve comparative relevance scoring and results interfaces.
• It addresses social search effectively, allowing users to collaborate on information gathering.”
We’re not too sure about the social search effectiveness, because our research says SharePoint relies on third-party vendors to fix that aspect, but in all other details Microsoft has invested a lot of funds and research into making SharePoint its spotlight product. To fix the social search problem, SurfRay has the best products to index and organize social content.
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2011
United Nations and Its Tech Challenges
December 20, 2011
From the “Why Am I Not Surprised” Department. News Flash.
UN Computer System Failure
A flub at the United Nations– an estimated nearly $400 million flub– has been made public as UN officials are scrambling to get the botched project back on track. Perhaps “flub” is too strong? Maybe in UN speak, the error was an administrative concern. Yes, that’s it. Administrative concern.
The United Nations’ project, known as Umoja, is a computer and software system that promised to reform the organization but has been at a standstill since June. Umoja, which was intended to be an administrative system to cut down on waste and fraud, was led by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Fox News’ article, “UN’s Botched Computer-System Overhaul: A Major ‘Failure’ of Ban Ki-Moon’s Management” tells us more:
Ban’s officials are scrambling to get the jinxed project known as Umoja (Swahili for unity) back on track after a key UN budget committee heard from Ban’s office last week that the sweeping information technology overhaul, already a year behind schedule, won’t be finished until 2015, three years beyond the original target date. The committee also said it was “deeply disturbed and dismayed” by the UN’s “apparent lack of awareness and foreknowledge” about the sputtering status of the project.”
This is entropy from top to bottom. Is this the UN’s approach to information management? It appears that guessing about technology may not work and the organization should probably make more solidified plans before pushing such a large and costly project forward. From peacekeeping to computing, the UN is rowing against the current of competence in my opinion.
Andrea Hayden, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint 2010 Lags Behind in Social Features
December 20, 2011
Beyond Search has written extensively on social media and implementations that help to achieve a higher level of social media integration. Recently, we have found more reporting devoted to the incorporation of social features into an organization’s enterprise solution. Bjorn Furuknap gives his insight into SharePoint 2010’s social functionality in his lighthearted blog entry, “Why SharePoint 2010 Social Features Suck.”
Try to get the activity feed to behave like the FaceBook activity feed and add simple things like a ‘Like’ or ‘Comment’ functionality to the feed . . . Try creating an ad-hoc filter of the activity feed, for example to implement a ‘Social Groups’ functionality where a temporary team, say the people in an organization responsible for the next department annual review, can organize their activities into a single activity feed. It turns out that the way the activity feed is implemented is so locked down and restricted that seemingly simple extensions like these are virtually impossible to create.
So how does an organization tackle both its social and enterprise needs? There are several good third party solutions out there, including Fabasoft Mindbreeze, who are devoting time and attention to social features. Fabasoft Mindbreeze has received the prestigious KM World Trendsetting Product of the Year 2011, making it the fourth year in a row that the Austrian enterprise solution took home the prize. In its previous win in 2010, its social media functionality was sited as a major factor.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise covers corporation -wide heterogeneous document stores and data sources such as email systems, file systems, databases, document management systems, intranets, the internet and social media.
We agree with Furuknap that social features, and social media functions, are just now being developed and implemented into enterprise solutions. Microsoft has never been one for rapid adoption or innovation, so SharePoint is suffering a bit in the social department. To meet your organization’s social needs we recommend seeking a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, and avoiding unnecessary aggravation.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IBM Predictions for Computing
December 20, 2011
Short honk: The $100 billion public relations machine caught me by surprise today. I have read some crazy stuff about the future. I did not expect IBM to climb a tree, crawl out on a limb, and then jump up and down to get my attention. Pretty darned nimble.
Navigate to “IBM ’5 in 5′ Predicts No More Passwords, Mind-Reading Smartphones.” Here’s the passage I noted:
“If you just need to think about calling someone, it happens,” IBM said of its prediction. “Or you can control the cursor on a computer screen just by thinking about where you want to move it.”
Mind-reading technology, known as bioinformatics, has already shown up in simple forms from toy makers such as Mattel, and engineers at IBM and other companies “have designed headsets with advanced sensors to read electrical brain activity that can recognize facial expressions, excitement and concentration levels, and thoughts of a person without them physically taking any actions,” the report said.
Okay, 60 months. My mobile drops calls, cannot misinterprets voice instructions, delivers a lousy data rate, and has the sound quality of talking through a tin can in my backyard when I was 10 years old. Mind control in 60 months. Not in rural Kentucky, dude.
I am starting the countdown now. Wow. Sounds like a great future.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Big Data Analytics and Sense Making with Synthesys
December 19, 2011
Tim Estes is the CEO and co-founder of Digital Reasoning. Digital Reasoning develops and markets solutions that provide Automated Understanding for Big Data.
There’s a great deal of talk about “big data” today. If you walk into an AT&T store near you, you may see the statistics of users sending over 3 Billion text messages a day or over 250 million tweets. Compare that to closer to 100 million or less tweets a day a year or two ago, and it’s daunting how rapidly the volume of digital information is increasing. A mobile phone without expandable storage frustrates users who want to keep a contacts list, rich media, and apps in their pocket. In organizations, the appetite for storage is significant. EMC, Hewlett Packard, and IBM are experiencing strong demand for their storage systems. Cloud vendors such as Amazon and Rackspace are also experiencing strong demand from companies offering compelling services to end users on their infrastructure. At a recent Amazon conference in Washington, Werner Vogels revealed that the AWS Cloud has hundreds of thousands of companies/customers running on it as some level. Finally, companies like Digital Reasoning are working the next generation of Cloud – automated understanding – that goes from a focus on infrastructure to sense-making of data that sits in hosted or private clouds.
While most of the attention has been on infrastructure like virtualization / hypervisors, Hadoop, and NoSQL data storage systems, we think those are really the enablers of the killer app for Cloud- which is making sense of data to solve information overload. Without next generation analytics and supporting technology, it is essentially impossible to:
- Analyze a flow of data from multiple sensors deployed in a factory
- Process mobile traffic at a telephone company
- Make sense of unstructured and structured information flowing through an email system
- Identify key entities and their importance in a stream of financial news and transaction data.
These are the real world problems that have engaged me for many years. I founded Digital Reasoning to automatically make sense of data because I believed that someday all software would learn and that would unleash the next great revolution in the Information Age. The demand for this revolution is inevitable because while data has increased exponentially, human attention has been essentially static in comparison. Technology to create better return on attention would go from “nice to have” to utterly essential. And now, that moment is here.
Digging a little deeper, Digital Reasoning has created a way to take human communication and use algorithms to make sense of it without having to depend on a human design, an ontology, or some other structure. Our system looks at patterns and the way a word is used in its context and bootstraps the understanding much like a human child does – creating associations and building into more complex relationships.
In 2009, we migrated onto Hadoop and began taking on the problem of managing very large scale unstructured data and move the industry beyond counting things that are well structured and toward being able to figure out exactly what the data means that you are measuring.
Digital Reasoning asks the question: “How do you take loose, noisy information that is disconnected and unstructured and then make sense of it so that you can then apply analytics to it in a way that is valuable to business?”
We identify actors, actions, patterns, and facts and then put it into the context of space and time in an efficient and scalable way. In the government scenario, that can mean to finding and stopping bad guys. In the legal environment they want to answer the questions of “who”, “what”, “where”, and “when”.
Digital Reasoning initially set our focus on the complex task of making sense out of massive volumes of unstructured text within the US Government Intelligence Community after the events of 9/11. But we also believe that our Synthesys software can be utilized in the commercial sector to create great value from the mountains of unstructured data that sit in the Enterprise and streaming in from the Web.
Companies with large-scale data will see value in investing in our technology because they cannot hire 100,000 people to go through and read all of the available material. This matters if you are a bank and trying to make financial trades. This matters for companies doing electronic discovery. This matters for health sectors that need help organizing medical records and guarding against fraud.
We are an emerging firm, growing rapidly and looking to have the best and the brightest join our quest to empower users and customers to make sense of their data through revolutionary software. With the recent investment from In-Q-Tel and partners of Silver Lake, I believe that Digital Reasoning has a great future ahead. We are on the bleeding edge of what is going on with Hadoop and Big Data in the engineering area and how to make sense of data through some of the most advanced learning algorithms in the world. Most of all we care that people are empowered with technology so that they can recover value and time in the race to overcome information overload.
To learn more about Digital Reasoning, navigate to our Web site and download our white paper.
Tim Estes, December 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Inteltrax: Top Stories, December 12 to December 16
December 19, 2011
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, the issue of change in the analytic world—for the better, for the worse and everything in between.
One example of change came from our story, “Data Mining Changing Scientific Thought” shows how the way scientists think is being streamlined by analytics.
On the other hand, “ManTech has Uphill Climb with Intelligence Analytics,” shows that not all change looks promising, like one company’s new focus on intelligence.
And some change, well, we’re just not sure how it’ll pan out, like with the story “Predicting the Ponies is Just Unstructured Data” which exposes how the gambling industry could be changed by analytic tools. For the better or worse is up for debate.
Change, in any aspect of life, is inevitable. However, the world of big data analytics seems more susceptible than most. And we couldn’t be happier, as we watch the unexpected turns these changes bring to the industry every day.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting http://www.inteltrax.com/
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
Use SurfRay to Process Excel Import
December 19, 2011
“Import Excel data to SharePoint List is a handy SharePoint 2007 addin that allows users to import the data stored in Excel spreadsheets into SharePoint.
“SharePoint lets a user create custom list from a spreadsheet, but lacks the ability to import data to an existing SP list. This feature, developed in C# .Net and easy to install, will do just that.”
Manufacturing Gains New Taxonomy
December 19, 2011
Most people commonly think of biology classifications when they hear the word taxonomy. However, it is a broader concept and Wand Inc. has developed taxonomies for numerous topics from medical specialties to corporate policy. The article, WAND Manufacturing Taxonomy Now Available discusses the advantages of their new manufacturing taxonomy.
Wand says that this taxonomy works well for companies with a document management project and has a need:
“to tag these documents based upon manufacturing process or concepts.” This taxonomy “covers manufacturing processes, quality control, manufacturing sales, manufacturing sales, manufacturing accounting, engineering and design, planning and more.”
Thus far, Wand had received overwhelmingly positive feedback on their latest addition.
Taxonomies are becoming an important tool and are enhancing the manufacturing process. What we really like is that it works not only with project data management systems, but also with the more advanced software solutions like Inforbix. Inforbix can use the existing taxonomies and get more out of your product data. These are revolutionary changes from revolutionary companies.
Jennifer Wensink, December 13, 2011
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