Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne Merge
March 22, 2012
Partners merge as Google goes its own direction in the enterprise. “Top Google and Salesforce Partners Merge, Form Global Cloud Co. Cloud Sherpas,” announces The Wall Street Journal. Valuable Google partner Cloud Sherpas is joining forces with Salesforce top partner GlobalOne Group. The new company will use the colorful Cloud Sherpas moniker. Details of the deal have not been released.
The CEO of the new Cloud Sherpas has reason to believe his company will be successful. The article reports:
“Many vendors claim to sell software that runs in the cloud, but Google and Salesforce have become two of the most significant cloud software platforms for all sizes of businesses, according to David Northington, the former chief executive of GlobalOne who is now chief executive of the combined company.
“Also, traditional IT services companies accustomed to offering expensive software that runs inside corporate walls and may take months or years to deploy are still catching up to the demand for cloud skills, he said, and that should give Cloud Sherpas and its customers a head start.”
Taking to the cloud can provide definite advantages; it can reduce costs and provide finer control over technology. However, because the field is changing so rapidly, businesses look to providers to double as cloudy advisers. With the experience behind both Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne, Northington believes his newly blended company is well positioned to provide such guidance.
No employees were axed in the merger. The new company will retain its 177 workers from GlobalOne and the 84 from the original CloudSherpas. In fact, they are actively hiring. Not only that, but the company anticipates acquiring more businesses and raising more money in the near future.
Now, that’s the way to set your sights sky high.
Stephen E. Arnold, March 22, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Launch SharePoint Services with Collaborative Solutions
March 22, 2012
Android and Alleged Fragmentation
March 22, 2012
I was in a third world health care facility this morning. As luck would have it, no fragmentation injuries ahead of me and twisted knickers. I kicked back in the delightful on deck circle for the emergency room checking out posts on my lousy notebook computer.
What did I spy? A headline about “fragmentation.” Well, in my line of work anything with the stem frag* warrants a second look. The headline? “Fragmentation B_mb Wounds Android in Developer War” is an interesting headline. One “watch word”, b_mb and one word on the fence, w-r.
The focus of the article was not on a military topic. The article describes how a mobile phone operating system has a negative impact because of the many different versions of the operating symptom. The collateral in this type of fragmentation affects developers. I see some impact upon civilian users.
There is no Google Android fragmentation. There are just different types of cookies. There is the parent cookie Google Android, and then the different children cookies. What’s the problem?
Here’s the passage I noted:
A new study conducted by IDC and mobile-developer platform and services company Appcelerator has determined that as Google’s open source Android operating system becomes more and more fragmented, fewer and fewer developers are putting it on their “must-code-for” list. “We’ve seen a steady erosion of interest in Android” among developers, Appcelerator’s principal mobile strategist Mike King told The Reg in a prebriefing before the study was released on Tuesday morning.
Okay, the sample size looks fine, but I don’t know anything about the representativeness of the sample. The fact that a single developer group was the source of the sample adds more questions about the validity of the survey.
So, let’s assume that the big study findings are okay. The hot platform for mobile developers to support is the walled garden inside the Apple Country Club & Bank. The losers living in the digital trailer courts are coders who are into Symbian, HP’s TouchPad, the BlackBerry Stone Age gizmos, and Windows Phone. It is early days for Windows 8, so these laggards may come on strong in the mobile developer race.
Navigating SharePoint Trials
March 22, 2012
SharePoint has almost become a corporate mandate, but how can you tell if and how SharePoint will work for your organization? Many companies want to run a trial to see if SharePoint is a good fit. CMSWire covers some SharePoint trial options in, “Office365 or SharePoint Foundation – What’s the Best SharePoint Trial?”
Chris Wright covers some of the major pros and cons:
But the world is slowly changing. The Cloud is now everywhere, and many enterprise applications and services are happily migrating. SharePoint is one of them, included as part of Microsoft’s wider Office365 offering. SharePoint Online, available as a free trial for 30 days, is now another way to investigate the world of SharePoint. However it is important to realize that Online differs from Foundation, and indeed all the locally installed versions, in a number of significant ways. So for the new users wanting to evaluate SharePoint, which is best — SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Online?
But what happens if a trial is run and SharePoint is not a great fit? The internet is full of content generated by SharePoint developers and users who give practical advice for customizing SharePoint to more effectively meet certain needs. If you determine that your organization cannot invest added time and money in customization, there is another option, third party solutions.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze is a strong enterprise search suite that is already tailored to the needs of end users and developers, cutting out the customization step and allowing more intuitive interfacing with all users.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze is more than a search:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise understands you, or to be more precise, understands what the most important information is for you at any precise moment in time. It is the center of excellence for your knowledge and simultaneously your personal assistant for all questions. The information pairing technology brings enterprise and Cloud data together.
Read more about their offerings and see if Fabasoft Mindbreeze might be an asset to your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 22, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
PLM Assists in All Phases of a Product’s Lifecycle
March 22, 2012
Product lifecycle management (PLM) has taken on a life of its own. 360 Enterprise Software breaks down a product lifecycle into five phases and explains how PLM can assist in each phase in their article “PLM Fundamentals: PLM’s Role in the 5 Phases of the Product Lifecycle.”
The first phase is planning and PLM applications can store ideas from “brainstorming sessions, collaborations and meetings.” Then the second and third phases are design and realize. CAD is often a major part of both phases and that information can be stored and distributed by PLM software. Support/service phase is the fourth and:
“When salespeople need information about a product quickly, they can turn to PLM’s collaboration tools to get in touch with the necessary and available product experts through an impromptu chat or discussion online. Also, technical support and service technicians can refer to product data stored in the company’s PLM applications…”
The final phase is retire/dispose can rely on PLM to determine if a “product can be safely disposed of and possibly recycled.”
CAD and PLM are virtually essential in a product lifecycle. Companies like Inforbix know this and are developing key software to assist in CAD data retrieval. Inforbix software helps users find, reuse and share product data throughout the company. We expect for PLM to become even more important as software development continue.
Jennifer Wensink, March 22, 2012
Another Poobah Insight: Marketing Is an Opportunity
March 21, 2012
Please, read the entire write up “Marketing Is the Next Big Money Sector in Technology.” When you read it, you will want to forget the following factoids:
- Google has been generating significant revenue from online ad services for about a decade
- Facebook is working to monetize with a range of marketing services every single one of the 800 million plus Facebook users
- Start ups in and around marketing are flourishing as the scrub brush search engine optimizers of yore bite the dust. A good example is the list of exhibitors at this conference.
The hook for the story is a quote from an azure chip consultancy. The idea is that as traditional marketing methods flame out, crash, and burn, digital marketing is the future. So the direct mail of the past will become spam email of the future I predict. Imagine.
Marketing will chew up an organization’s information technology budget. The way this works is that since “everyone” will have a mobile device, the digital pitches will know who, what, where, why, and how a prospect thinks, feels, and expects. The revolution is on its way, and there’s no one happier than a Madison Avenue executive who contemplates the riches from the intersection of technology, hapless prospects, and good old fashioned hucksterism. The future looks like a digital PT Barnum I predict.
What Do Search Buy Outs Mean?
March 21, 2012
I worked through the 75 profiles I maintain on search and content processing vendors. Here’s a list of the Big Dogs in search in Year 2000 and what happened to these companies since this date.
| Original Name | Buyer | Comment |
| Autonomy | Hewlett Packard | “A baby tiger” |
| Blossom | Available | Hosted search |
| Brainware | Lexmark | Back office |
| Convera | Out of business | Parts sold off |
| dtSearch | Available | Low cost leader |
| Endeca | Oracle | Unclear |
| Exalead | Dassault Systèmes | Unclear |
| Fast Search | Microsoft | An add in for SharePoint |
| Innerprise | GoDaddy | Search |
| InQuira | Oracle | Unclear |
| Inxight Software | SAP property | Unclear |
| Isys Software | Lexmark | Unclear |
| Mindbreeze | Part of Fabasoft | Replacement for SharePoint search |
| Mondosoft | SurfRay | On shelf |
| Ontolica | SurfRay | Replacement for SharePoint search |
| Panoptic | Squiz | Now Funnelback |
| Recommind | Available | In and out of enterprise search |
| Stratify | Autonomy | Formerly Purple Yogi |
| Teratext | SAIC | Unclear |
| Thunderstone | Available | Enterprise search |
| TREX | SAP | Unclear |
| TripleHop | Oracle | Unclear |
| Vivisimo | Available | Customer support |
This is a selected list. These 22 companies provide a snapshot of what’s happened in enterprise search in the last 12 years. Some observations:
First, in the list of 22 entries, I have used the word “unclear” as a comment eight times. The reason is that I am not sure how the technology will be deployed or if the technology has been orphaned (TREX) or held in reserve (Mondosoft). How does one apply a “system” to a search system (Dassault Exalead)?
Second, of this set of 22 companies which I have written about in Enterprise Search Report (2004 to 2006), Beyond Search (Gilbane), and The New Landscape of Search (Pandia in Oslo), five have not been acquired to my knowledge. One wonders if and when these search vendors will be taken off the table.
Third, the list begs the questions, “What are the next wave of search and content processing companies to be purchased, merged, or integrated into a larger entity?” Great question and one which I will not answer in a free blog post.
My thoughts, before they slip away, are:
- With the interest in open source search, what will be the long term revenue and cost picture for proprietary search solutions?
- Will content analytics vendors become the “new search vendors”? IBM’s use of Lucene for its various search solutions provides a suggestion of this shift in its Content Analytics product.
- How will the companies which have acquired search technology make money from these purchases AND be able to invest in the research and development necessary to keep the systems in step with licensee requirements? Frankly, I don’t know. There is only so much money available to pump into the black hole of information retrieval for technology, which is some cases is almost 25 years young.
Net net: Okay, lots of company have acquired search and retrieval systems. Now what? Not my problem.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Vivisimo Does Paper.li for Content
March 21, 2012
Vivisimo, the information optimization software provider, recently rolled out an automated blog called the Vivisimo Daily. We find it interesting that the blog’s appearance coincides with the company’s step up in customer support marketing.
This microsite has a variety of different media sources in which it displays content, ranging from posts to videos. They even have a CXO mobile contest.
In reference to CXO, the editor’s note states:
Customer eXperience Optimization (CXO) connects customer-facing professionals in your sales, support and customer service organizations with all of the information they need for successful customer, partner and sales prospect interactions.
The service is operated by Paper.li, a quick and easy way for organizations to publish their own online newspapers. This is an example of a company utilizing Paper.li to assist with a content play. More original content might be a plus.
Jasmine Ashton, March 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google+ Designer Profiled
March 21, 2012
We see that Google is ramping its PR engine. Mercury News declares, “Apple Pioneer Brings Emotion to Google+.” The write up profiles Andy Hertzfeld, a longtime Apple veteran who now works at Google. Hertzfeld designed the prototype for Google+’s Circles feature, which many consider to be the social site’s strongpoint. He also gets a lot of the credit for Google’s visual changes over the past year.
Writer Mike Swift quotes Hertzfeld regarding his approach:
“We try to operate at the intersection of design and engineering. One of the reasons why things aren’t as good as they could be sometimes is that the engineers and the designers don’t work closely together enough.”
Hertzfeld was around for Apple’s break-through graphical user interface, which introduced the very concept of clicking on icons to launch software. He has written a book about that time, “Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made”. Hertzfeld commented:
“ . . . The real breakthrough of the Macintosh was that we cared about UI. I learned in a formative experience that caring about UI matters, and if you do care about UI, you can make the world a better place.’’
As a user, I can say I do appreciate that attitude.
Stephen E. Arnold, March 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Time for SharePoint Reference Data Cleaning
March 21, 2012
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