Silo Syndrome Claims the Sky Is Falling
April 18, 2013
Organizations in the financial services, healthcare, technology, e-business and government industries are at an increased risk for the newly diagnosed “Silo Syndrome”, according to the article “Thousands of Companies Diagnosed with Dreaded ‘Silo Syndrome’” published by PR Newswire.
Apparently, the symptoms of corporate “Silo Syndrome” are as follows:
“*An inability to immediately access business information
- Searching for answers but never really finding them
- Problems processing terms like “unstructured content”
- A penchant to unnecessarily flatten relational data
- Inability to join concepts together in real-time
- Needlessly accessing multiple systems for ‘what’ and ‘why’ answers”
Big data giant Attivio is championing awareness initiatives for what they claim is an increasingly ubiquitous syndrome, as CTO Sid Probstein stars in his very own PSA-style video. Attivio has also created a “Six Signs of Silo Syndrome” warning sign, which can be printed and displayed anywhere.
While Attivio no doubt holds the cure to “Silo Syndrome”, maybe humans build silos because silos are useful. After all, silos are required by various regulations, and silos simply make sense for certain types of business processes. Sure there is room for improvement, but sometimes silos just make sense.
Samantha Plappert, April 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
McKinsey Supplies Valuable Information Through New Newsletter
April 18, 2013
Analytics outfit McKinsey is engaged in a savvy marketing effort. The company now offers a newsletter packed with information on big data, the McKinsey Quarterly, first published in March. For example, they help businesses put together big-data strategies with their first article, while the second details three key challenges of data analytics. This month, they have turned to a crucial market segment; the company tells us:
“Two additional articles–the first set in a series on how analytics has been changing key industries–apply these insights specifically to health care. The Big-Data Revolution in US Health Care: Accelerating Value and Innovation explains why analytics could transform the sector. How Big Data Can Revolutionize Pharmaceutical shows a way forward for companies struggling with declining success rates and stagnant pipelines. Both include video interviews with McKinsey directors, who discuss the challenges that organizations face.”
McKinsey is proud to provide well-informed management consulting services to organizations in a variety of fields around the world. The veteran company was founded in 1926, during the early days of management theory. More recently, McKinsey has prudently seized upon technology as a natural addition to the core considerations of strategy, organization, and operations.
Cynthia Murrell, April 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Temis and MarkLogic Collaborate on Big Data Challenges
April 18, 2013
Well, this is quite a surprise. Temis announces, “TEMIS and MarkLogic Strengthen Strategic Alliance.” Semantic content-management firm Temis is partnering with MarkLogic, who boasts of providing the only enterprise NoSQL database in the market, to tackle unstructured data. The press release tells us:
“With new, enhanced integration capabilities, TEMIS’ Luxid® and MarkLogic® Server can now help organizations do more with their content. . . .
“TEMIS’ Luxid® and MarkLogic® Server count many joint customer implementations. Their integration delivers seamless semantic enrichment of data stored in the enterprise NoSQL database with the Luxid® domain-specific and multilingual annotation process. This enables organizations to build powerful Big Data applications, combining content semantics with real-time database agility to make massive volumes of unstructured content easier to exploit.”
Metadata master Temis was Founded in 2000 by some folks with IBM-based text-mining experience under their belts. The company now has offices across Europe and North America. This year, their flagship Luxid Content Enrichment Platform won the Software & Information Industry Association‘sCodie Award for Best Semantic Technology Platform.
With a laser focus on efficient and fruitful databases, MarkLogic is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices around the world. The company was founded in 2001, and has been working beyond the relational database since long before “big data” became a buzzword.
Cynthia Murrell, April 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
HP Shares Some of Its 2013 Autonomy Positioning
April 17, 2013
Readers of this information service, which I use to keep track of information I find useful for my columns and speeches, know that I have held Autonomy’s marketing in high regard. There are some azure chip consultants and failed webmasters who pointed out that the phrase “meaning based computing” was not particularly useful. I disagreed. Autonomy—the pre acquisition version of the company—was a darned good marketing and sales organization.
What is easily forgotten in today’s “did I get more traffic on my Facebook page” world is that Autonomy excelled in three areas:
- The company was able to enter new markets such as video indexing and fraud detection when other search vendors were running around pitching, “We can index all an organization’s information in one interface.” Autonomy picked a sector and figured out how to paint a compelling story around the IDOL black box, the notion of autonomous operation to reduce some costs, and “meaning based computing.” Competitors responded with a flood of buzz words, which made sense at an off site strategy meeting, but did not translate to simple propositions like “automatic,” reduce costs, and process content in more than 400 different formats.” As a sales pitch, Autonomy did a good job and managed to stay at the top of the search vendor stack in terms of closing deals.
- The company used a combination of buying firms which would permit upsells of IDOL related products and very capable management methods to help make the deals pay off. Examples range from the Zantaz buy and the subsequent leveraging of that firm’s technology into cloud service. Autonomy bought Interwoven and pulled together its marketing services into a reasonably compelling bundle of analytics with IDOL sauce.
- Autonomy developed what I thought were clever products and services which caught the eye of certain customers and helped the firm enter new markets. Examples range from the now mostly forgotten Kenjin (a smart desktop service) to Aurasma, a virtual reality service for print advertisers.
HP’s management and advisors paid a lot of money to own Autonomy. Like most search and content processing acquisitions, the realties of running a company in this very tough sector became apparent after a few months. I am not interested in the financial and legal battles underway. What’s important is that HP purchased a company, and HP now has to make it work.
A very interesting pair of articles or semi-marketing type articles appeared in eWeek on April 16, 2013. The first is “HP’s Autonomy: 10 Ways It’s Contributing to HP’s Hardware Story.” These slideshows are ways to get page views. Please, flip through the images in the slideshow. Here’s what I noted:
First, HP seems to acknowledge that turnover and management of the HP version of Autonomy has been a problem. The slideshow calls this a “rebirth”. But the big news from a marketing historian’s point of view is that “meaning based computing” is gone and replaced by “the OS for human information.” I find this fascinating. On one hand, competitors can now carp at the scope of the IDOL technology. On the other, in this social buzzword era, “human information” is actually quite a nice turn of phrase. I won’t make a big deal of the fact that when IDOL’s fraud detection algorithms are working on content, the data does not have to be “human” at all. It can be based on a person’s credit transaction, but algorithms for fraud work on machine and human generated information. No big deal because such distinctions are not of interest in today’s here and now environment.
Second, I did not notice much emphasis on search and retrieval. For someone familiar with Autonomy IDOL, I suppose that search is self evident. Autonomy, however, is mostly an information access system. The add ons were, as I noted above, were extensions or wrappers of the IDOL core, based on Bayesian methods and enhanced in many ways since the mid 1990s. Yep, Autonomy’s technology may seem magical to HP management, but it has been around a while and does not perform some of the functions which Google backed Recorded Future performs or which a skilled SAP programmer can crank out. To me, this is a big deal because it underscores the futility of HP’s trying to make big money deals based on plain old search. Companies chasing search deals are not landing huge deals like those HP needs to make its top line grow.
Third, the “10 ways” are focused almost exclusively on Autonomy capabilities which have been available for a long time. I think that the notion of putting Autonomy functions in a printer interesting, but that idea has been floating around for years. I heard presentations from Intel and Xerox which talked about putting content processing in hardware. Interesting stuff, but the “10 ways” are useful because each makes clear to competitors where HP’s marketing and sales will be going. Examples include using Autonomy for customer support, content management.
Great stuff.
The second write up is “HP’s Autonomy Focused on Big Data, Cloud, Mobile, Security: GM”.
This write up contains a number of quite useful insights into HP Autonomy. The “voice” of the article is Robert Youngjohns, the HP manager for the Autonomy unit. I found a number of passages which warrant quoting. I want to highlight three snippets from the three page article. You can get the complete picture in the original article which is worth reading carefully.
First, the story contains the reference to “magical”. Autonomy is math, not magic. The use of the word “magical” is fascinating. It suggests that Autonomy goes well beyond what “normal” content processing can deliver.
Second, the interview lays out the markets which Autonomy will focus upon. These are, as I understand the lingo, big data, information governance, and digital marketing. I am not sure what these phrases encompass, but it is clear that “search” is not playing a front and center role.
Third, there is acknowledgment that the content archiving market is important. The pairing of Autonomy and various HP products is significant. Autonomy will be, to some degree, baked into other HP products and services. This is, in my opinion, an extension of the formula which made Autonomy a revenue producer prior to its sale to HP.
Net net: The Autonomy for 2013 will be fascinating to monitor.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2013
Thoughts on the Birthday of Hadoop
April 17, 2013
Hadoop is celebrating its seventh anniversary and it marks an important landmark for open source software. The Apache Software Foundation is instrumental in developing and supporting fledgling open source offerings, and graduating them up to useful components for the developer community. Read the full report in the article, “Seven Thoughts on Hadoop’s Seventh Birthday.”
The article begins:
“It has only been seven years since Hadoop’s first release, and think of the amazing things it has already empowered us to accomplish. Doug Cutting (Hadoop’s founder, Apache Software Foundation chair and Cloudera’s chief architect) published seven thoughts on Hadoop’s seventh birthday at the Cloudera blog, and we sought his permission to repost those here. “
Many other open source superstars started their lives in the Apache Software Foundation incubator. Apache Lucene and Solr is an instrumental component of many of the emerging open source enterprise solutions, particularly those that focus on unstructured or big data. LucidWorks uses Lucene and Solr to provide award winning enterprise search solutions.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Comperio 2013 SharePoint Seminar to Charge Extra for No Shows
April 17, 2013
Held in Oslo, Norway, this year’s Enterprise Social and Search with SharePoint seminar promises its usual diverse audience and tech-based discussions. It will take place on May 14, 2013 from 9:00-11:30. Although official events begin at 9:00, show up early for breakfast and networking at 8:30.
The seminar is free, unless, of course you do not show up without providing advanced notice.
According to the seminars registration page, the audience will include the following:
“CIOs, IT Directors, Collaboration Leads, SharePoint Leads, Social Networking Leads, Enterprise Search Leads, Big Data Leads, Business Intelligence Leads, Communication Directors, HR Directors.”
Technology discussed includes SharePoint 2010 and 2013, FAST Search for SharePoint, Comperio FRONT, Hadoop, HD Insight, and Yammer.
Not a bad line up for a free seminar in Oslo. However, those who register but do not attend (and do not provide notice) will be charged a fee of kr. 200, or about $30 US dollars. Considering the expenses Comperio will shell out for each attendee, this no-show charge is an interesting approach to guaranteeing attendance and accounting for wasted expenses.
Samantha Plappert, April 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Big Data Saving Money and More
April 17, 2013
The cost of running a business and its computing systems is quickly becoming one of the greatest burdens on almost every industry. While systems get more intuitive and fast, they get pricier. Thankfully, we are discovering how big data has some solutions for this. We discovered an interesting perspective from UnReveal’s article, “Big Data? Bring it On.”
According to the story:
“Harmonize and optimize all e-data without complex, expensive and time-consuming IT processes
- Fuse disparate information together without the need for extensive data-mapping projects and linking structured fields by common keys.
- No artificial manipulation or human interference that could distort results and outcomes. uReveal connects and reads all data in its natural state.
- New data is integrated as frequently as servers are refreshed allowing for near real-time analysis and more actionable results.”
We like the message this sends and agree. However, some people have even bigger expectations for their big data. According to a recent Tech America Foundation story, government big data saves money, but also lives. “According to 87 percent of federal IT officials and 75 percent of state IT officials, the use of real-time Big Data solutions will save a significant number of lives each year.” All we can say is wow. This makes us eager to see now big data next invades our lives.
Patrick Roland, April 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Data Job Market Boom
April 17, 2013
Big data and analytics means more than just helping companies wade through unstructured data to make better decisions. In this time of economic woe, it also means jobs. Few other places outside of fracking are people hiring like they are for the big data revolution, as we learned from a recent Government News article, “SAIC Builds Victorian Cyber Security Center.”
According to the story:
“Global research and development company, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) will develop the regional cyber security centre to support its efforts for the Australian Government and industry clients. The researchers will also be involved with developing software applications associated with SAIC subsidiary CloudShield Technologies Inc, and TeraText products. According to the Victorian Government, the centre will create 50 skilled jobs involved with the facility over the next three years.”
As we have heard from several other sources, the big data job market is booming. Dice recently broke down the outlook for the market and what skills data experts need. Saying: “The expected market for Big Data is expected to surpass $100 billion…This means that employment opportunities in the area will increase.” We agree and see this as a boom time to get into the industry that logically isn’t going anywhere, since we are producing more and more data all the time and need someone to manage it.
Patrick Roland, April 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Apache Software Foundation Supports Student Initiatives
April 16, 2013
One of the most exciting aspects of the open source community, particularly the Apache Software Foundation, is the investment in the next generation. Apache Software Foundation proves their dedication to the new generation of open source developers with their Google Summer of Code (GSoc) program. Read more about the opportunity in the article, “The Apache Software Foundation Community Development Project Welcomes Student Proposals for Google Summer of Code 2013.”
The article begins:
“The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)’s Community Development (ComDev) project today announced its acceptance into the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization for the eighth consecutive year. The ComDev team helps newcomers learn about the ASF’s projects, governance, and activities, and guides them in becoming part of the meritocratic, all-volunteer Apache community. Established in 2005, the Google Summer of Code offers student developers from around the world stipends to write code for various Open Source software projects over a three month period.”
This type of continuing program serves as very good news in the developer world. Moving beyond the concerns for sheer profitability, open source is concerned with scalability and efficiency in the workforce, therefore investing in the next generation of promising developers. These developers may then go on to produce solutions to address the data concerns of the future, just as Apache Lucene/Solr developers today are contributing to award-winning solutions like LucidWorks.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Avoiding Unnecessary Data
April 16, 2013
Speed is the key. We can talk about a lot of different elements that help build successful big data and analytics, but at the end of the day a program’s speed is the thing that matters above all else. Shaving a few seconds off organizing unstructured data can add up to a lot over the lifecycle of a business and there are some impressive steps being taken to avoid wasting time with unnecessary data, as we discovered in a recent Data Center Knowledge story, “IBM Advances Big Data Platform, PureData System for Hadoop.”
According to the story:
“IBM BLU Acceleration delivers key information to users faster by extending the capabilities of traditional in-memory systems – which allows data to be loaded into Random Access Memory instead of hard disks for faster performance – by providing in-memory performance even when data sets exceed the size of the memory. Innovations in BLU Acceleration include “data skipping,” which allows the ability to skip over data that doesn’t need to be analyzed…”
IBM’s breakthrough couldn’t come at a more appropriate time, because Computer Weekly has just released a story about the millions companies waste on storing and dealing with unnecessary data. Read it here. The key with all this is streamlining. Business moves faster than ever so any step that can be taken to minimize drag is welcomed.
Patrick Roland, April 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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