Talend and Amazon Love
March 6, 2013
Talend has been collaborating with Amazon Web Services, we learn in Enhanced Online News’ post, “Talend Expands Big Data Integration Platform with Support for Amazon Redshift.” Business analysts, data scientists, and enterprise architects will soon be able to manage their Amazon Redshift data using three solutions from Talend, Talend Open Studio for Big Data, Talend Enterprise Big Data, and Talend Platform for Big Data. The write-up tells us:
“By using Talend’s connectors to Amazon Redshift, users will be able to load and extract data to and from Amazon Redshift, and also connect the Cloud-based data warehousing platform to the full spectrum of transactional, operational and analytic data sources. . . . Only Talend scales for today’s big data and cloud environments with more than 450 native connectors to relational databases, packaged applications, SaaS applications, files, legacy systems, Hadoop clusters, NoSQL databases, and more.
“In addition, Talend’s unique data quality capabilities, natively included in the Talend Platform for Big Data, eliminate inconsistent data, enforce rules and create consistent information through standardization.”
Talend says their Redshift connectors will be available within the month from Talend Exchange, the company’s community sharing platform, or directly from the Talend Studio. Future versions of the Talend Platform will have the connectors built in.
Talend was already a leader in open-source data management when its 2010 acquisition of Sopera boosted its standing in that market. It is a leading open-source vendor, providing middleware for both data management and application integration. The company takes pride in its powerful and flexible open solutions.
Cynthia Murrell, March 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Predictive Analysis Progress
March 6, 2013
Using data analysis to predict the future, a feat naturally called predictive analysis, is an intriguing facet of the analysis prism. GMA News takes a look at some progress on such software in, “New Software Can Predict Future News.” I suppose “new” is in the eye of the beholder; Recorded Future has been doing this for a couple of years now.
This article, though, covers research performed by Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Working with twenty-two years’ worth of New York Times articles and other information online, researchers have been testing ways of using this data to predict outbreaks of disease, violence, and other sources of significant mortality. Grim subject matter, to be sure, but imagine if we could take steps to deflect or minimize such occurrences before they happen. The article informs us:
“The system uses 22 years of New York Times archives, from 1986 to 2007, as well as data from the Internet to learn about what leads up to major news events. [Technion-Israel ‘s Kira]Radinsky said one useful source was DBpedia, a structured form of the information inside Wikipedia constructed using crowdsourcing. Other sources included WordNet, which helps software understand the meaning of words, and OpenCyc, a database of common knowledge. ‘We can understand, or see, the location of the places in the news articles, how much money people earn there, and even information about politics,’ Radinsky said. With all this information, researchers get valuable context not available in news articles, and which is necessary to figure out general rules for what events precede others.”
It appears that this project is far from complete, and Microsoft has formed no plans to bring it to market, according to Eric Horvitz of the Microsoft team. The article does acknowledge Recorded Future‘s work in this area, noting their strong customer base within the intelligence community.
Who can predict when the rest of us will get the chance to give this compelling technology a whirl?
Cynthia Murrell, March 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ushahindi Revises SwiftRiver Platform
March 6, 2013
Ushahidi shares information on the latest version of its open-source intelligence platform in, “SwiftRiver Throws a Lifeline to People Drowning in Information.” The group is mixing its metaphors—rivers do not throw lifelines, people do. No matter; we’ll cut them some slack since we appreciate their dedication to open source.
SwiftRiver does what many, many programs do—wrestle huge amounts of data from disparate sources into something manageable and, ideally, useful. One difference from other options—this platform sorts for authority and accuracy, not simple popularity. The developers have devised some terminology that is kind of cute, but also memorable and intuitive. The write-up tells us:
“Simply, the ‘river’ is made up by billions of bits of information. In the context of SwiftRiver, we call these things ‘droplets.’ For example, common droplets in the river are tweets, Facebook updates, and blog posts. These are common examples, but by definition, things like text messages, emails, and even rows in a database table are considered droplets, too. . . .
“Once SwiftRiver analyzes all the droplets, you then have the ability to filter them down from that torrential river to a manageable stream. In addition to filtering, you can run different analyses on them, helping you get the ‘big picture’ of your set of droplets.”
The team rebuilt much of SwiftRiver so it would play nicely with the Ushahidi core platform and its Crowdmap, but it also works as a standalone application.
The non-profit Ushahidi, whose name means “testimony” in Swahili, has unusual roots. It began as a Web site which mapped episodes of violence and peace efforts, as reported by witnesses online or with mobile phones, across Kenya in 2008. The platform designed to managed these reports grew into SwiftRiver. The organization has since dedicated itself to developing open source-software that democratizes information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping. Their volunteer developers reside primarily in Africa, but Europe, South America, and the U.S. are also represented.
Cynthia Murrell, March 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Exclusive Interview: Mark Bennett of LucidWorks
March 5, 2013
Engineer Mark Bennett says it’s the tools that matter. Beyond Search agrees. Having tools and talking about tools are two very different things.
Mr. Bennett, co-founder of New Idea Engineering, recently brought more than twenty years’ enterprise search experience to LucidWorks, along with knowledge across major commercial search platforms, superior mathematics and physics-related disciplinary training, and a history in the search industry, including an early tenure at Verity, one of the pioneers in enterprise and large-scale information retrieval back in the 1990s.
Mark Bennett of LucidWorks, a member of their core enterprise search engineering team, recently granted an exclusive interview to the Arnold Information Technology Search Wizards Speak series to discuss the trajectory of search in 2013. LucidWorks is the leading developer of search, discovery, and analytics software based on Apache Lucene and Apache Solr technology. The full text of the interview is available at http://goo.gl/eoeuz.
He told Beyond Search:
“In a nutshell: search, analytics, and content processing vendors have to recognize that what is needed to allow developers to use the product is different from what is required to sell the product and deliver software which users embrace,” Bennett said about the immediate future of search products. “The challenge that keeps search specialists engaged is the problem of dealing with outliers—bizarre business requirements that every project seems to unearth. Outliers are the new norm.”
Bennett recalls a talk with a vendor ten years about a particularly tough search problem. Then, the vendor “ticked off a half dozen reasons why it was really very hard to solve and not worth the effort.” Years later, open source people visited the same problem, came up with a similar list, and diligently worked through those items. “LucidWorks, for instance, delivers facets, suggestions, advanced file storage, and high performance without the punishing costs of proprietary solution,” Bennett explained.
Stephen E. Arnold, Managing Director of Arnold Information Technology and publisher of the influential search industry blog Beyond Search, said:
“In my analysis of open source search, I rated LucidWorks as one of the leading vendors in enterprise search. Other firms with open source components have not yet achieved the technical critical mass of LucidWorks. Proprietary search vendors are integrating open source search technology into their systems in an effort to reduce their technology costs. At this time, LucidWorks is one of the leading vendors of enterprise and Web-centric search. Firms like Attivio (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=236514#.US9fGzBcgug) and ElasticSearch (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=237410) ElasticSearch are racing to catch up with LucidWorks’ robust technology, engineering and consulting services, and training programs.”
Bennett commented on the differences between LucidWorks and other retrieval solutions companies. “Despite all the comparisons done lately, the target audiences for most open source solutions are very different,” he explained. “If you spin up a copy of Solr you’ve got a very powerful Web user interface, and LucidWorks gives you even more of an administrative user interface. But when you fire up ElasticSearch, you’ve got a REST API.”
Bennett still often works from the Unix command prompt. “But when I watch a Windows or Mac power user for a day, and then watch a Unix command prompt guru—both get a lot of work done. My point is that each is a different type of power user. By the way, I work from the Unix command prompt myself.”
His point is that vendors need to be able to address the user interface preferences. “I do wonder what happens when an ElasticSearch developer hands off an application to a busy information technology person or an operations team to manage. Either those new owners are will need to know the ‘Web command line’ (URL and JSON syntax) extremely well, or if not, an administrative framework will be needed.”
LucidWorks is a step beyond more commercial proprietary search systems, in Bennett’s opinion, because it serves both groups of users. “Our professional services team has experience with many of other search engines. Chances are we’ve worked with many of the pieces before and know how to crack tough problems quickly. If an issue is a first time event, I am confident we can develop a solution.” He added:
“LucidWorks has delivered an open source enterprise search solution which accomplishes two things,” Arnold said. “First, it is an excellent alternative to many proprietary information retrieval systems. Second, the system takes the rough edges off some open source search solutions which add to an organization’s costs, not keeping them within budget allocations.”
Search is not a “one size fits all” solution, Bennett confirmed. “So while some engines drop features that ‘only three percent of people will ever use’, other groups realize that it’s the tools that matter.”
Visit the LucidWorks website at http://www.lucidworks.com.
Donald Anderson, March 5, 2013
Sponsored by Mediscripts, the world leader in prescription solutions for health professionals worldwide
Arnold Lecture Cebit 2013
March 5, 2013
An abbreviated version of Stephen E Arnold’s lecture about enterprise search challenges at the 2013 Cebit Conference is now available. To listen to the eight minute talk, navigate to the audio archive. You can find additional information on the ArnoldIT portal page at www.xenky.com.
Stuart Schram, March 1, 2013
Conference Brings Cloud Startups to Paris
March 5, 2013
Open source themed conferences are surging in popularity. In addition to the strong open source community maintained by online communities like SearchHub, conferences are another meaningful way to get like-minds together and innovate quickly and effectively. A similar cloud computing themed conference is making its way across the pond with the CloudConf this summer in Paris. Rude Baguette gives the highlights in, “CloudConf brings Heroku, Elastic Search, dotCloud, and Hadoop to Paris June 7th.”
The article says:
“The latest event brought to you by dotConferences, CloudConf brings together speakers form the world’s leading cloud startups to speak about the most important topics in Cloud Computing. The event will feature Noah Zoschke of Heroku, who came out to Paris last month as well for UXD4Startups, as well as Shay Banon, the creator of Elastic Search, which just announced a $24 Million fundraising. Solomon Hykes, founder of dotCloud, will also be present, with dotCloud being (one of) the only French startup(s) to have gone through Y-Combinator.”
Last week, North American open source fans enjoyed one of the best conferences available at ApacheCon. LucidWorks is a recurring sponsor. As a major player in the open source enterprise solution field, LucidWorks recognizes the value of investing in the developer community. Stronger code leads to stronger value-added solutions.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 5, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
LucidWorks Partners with MapR
March 4, 2013
MapR Technologies and LucidWorks have proven to be good partners in the past. They are again joining forces to offer the best Big Data analytics solution on the market. PR Newswire offers the press release for the joint venture in, “LucidWorks™ Teams with MapR™ Technologies to Offer Best-in-Class Big Data Analytics Solution.”
The release states:
“Existing business intelligence (BI) tools have simply not been designed to provide spontaneous search on multi-structured data in motion. Responding directly to this need, LucidWorks, the company transforming the way people access information, and MapR Technologies, the Hadoop technology leader, today announced the integration between LucidWorks Search™ and MapR. Available now, the combined solution allows organizations to easily search their MapR Distributed File System (DFS) in a natural way to discover actionable insights from information maintained in Hadoop.”
LucidWorks builds upon the strong search infrastructure of Solr. Adding this to the power of Hadoop through the MapR distribution makes it a solution that it without equal. The partnership makes it easier to put Big Data analytics into motion while combining the security strengths of both technologies.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 4, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Palantir Embraces Open Source
March 4, 2013
Palantir leaves its interesting legal past and affirms open-source goodness, we learn from Directions Magazine’s article, “Palantir: An Open Source Development Success Story.”
The tale begins with Gotham, an analytics platform with a nifty new geospatial component, in 2007. The product launched successfully, and Palantir looked to expand to different databases across a variety of industries. See the article for the details of their needs and their decision-making process; long story short, the company chose PostGIS as the springboard for their solution.
Yes, springboard. It took a lot of tinkering to make the software do just what they wanted, but the experience with the open source community was a positive one for the company. In fact, Palantir went on working with OpenGeo to develop more PostGIS enhancements that would benefit more than their own company. The article tells us:
“Gotham developers were happy to fund this open source development and were especially impressed with the network effects of community bug testing and further feature development. To them it seemed only fair that others would be able to benefit from their investment, since they had benefited so greatly from what was already built by others and would similarly benefit from what others built in the future. Their assumption has proved correct; since Palantir’s original investment, many users have funded or developed new functions and performance enhancements for geography calculations.”
If interested in the development of geospatial applications, the details in this article are worth checking out. Palantir was so happy with their open source experience that they have not only continued to support others’ open source projects, but have also opened some open source ventures of their own.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Palantir Technologies focuses on improving the ways their client organizations analyze data. The company was founded in 2004 by some enterprising folks from PayPal and from Stanford University.
Cynthia Murrell, March 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
JackBe Releases Presto 3.5 BI Solution
March 4, 2013
The Best Analytics Blog presents us with quite the string of buzzwords in, “JackBe Brings Metric-Driven Real-Time Operational Intelligence to Front-Line. . . .” The press release tells us that the business intelligence outfit JackBe has released the newest version of its flagship product, Presto. This version is said to improve the accessibility of the software’s operational measures. The write-up states:
“Presto 3.5 extends its user-friendly interface to include new options to create dashboards through drag-and-drop, to add custom visualizations as easily as plugging in the view, and to customize Presto with a customer’s own logo and colors. Once created, all Presto dashboards are portable with HTML5 apps that run anywhere, including SharePoint, portals, websites, tablets and mobile phones with the same look-and-feel of the native device. Presto 3.5 has enhanced security for mobile devices and a more secure single-sign-on experience for social media sites.”
JackBe emphasizes real-time intelligence tools and easy-to-use dashboards while promising tight security features. They also offer their own add-ons for use with mobile devices, portals, and SharePoint. The company is headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with offices in Mexico City and Fremont, California.
Cynthia Murrell, March 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
InetSoft Releases a New Version of Its BI Software
March 4, 2013
Business intelligence and analytics outfit InetSoft has released the latest version of its BI suite, Style Intelligence, we learn from “InetSoft Releases Style Intelligence 11.4” at the Technology Evaluation Centers’ blog. With this iteration, the company aims to ramp up support for both collaborative and self-service features. The write-up tells us:
“Some new key features include the ability to include annotations, which allow users to write comments on any dashboard and share them with team members, as well as bookmarks, which allow users to save the settings of a particular view, enabling users to get back to a certain pre-configured visualization to review or share with others.
“On the search side, Style Intelligence has been enhanced with features that allow users to perform search across report metadata to ease their discovery process.”
Writer Jorge Garcia notes that the platform’s data mashup features, combined with the communication tools mentioned above, make for easier collaboration and information-sharing.
Launched in 1996, InetSoft makes its home in Piscataway, New Jersey. The company deploys its business intelligence software to enterprises large and small, across industries, worldwide. Their focus on pleasing and interactive dashboards helps organizations ensure their end users make the most of their software investment.
Cynthia Murrell, March 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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