Unusual Article about Autonomy and its Founder
February 5, 2014
I was surprised to read “Who is Mike Lynch and What’s the Deal with Autonomy and Hewlett-Packard?” The write up appeared in IBTimes on February 4, 2014.
I continue to monitor Autonomy, but I focus on the technology and Autonomy’s impact on the search and content processing sector. The goose is frisky, but he has not used this shocking statement in his discussion of the company:
“He, together with some former Autonomy bosses, have started technology investment firm Invoke Capital, which has a $1bn fund to play with. Its first investment was in Darktrace, which calls itself “the world’s first Behavioural Cyber Defence platform” and sounds like a sci-fi euphemism for toilet bowl skidmarks.”
The write up is similar to those I have seen from azure chip (my phrase for low- and mid-tier) consulting firms.
I have released a free analysis of Autonomy’s technology in a Xenky white paper. You may download it at http://bit.ly/1nTtueY. The write up focuses on the technology, business approach, and products the company offered in the ten year period from 1996 to 2006. A longer version that includes an analysis of three core patent documents is available for those who are interested in Bayesian-Laplacian methods, Monte Carlo Markov Chains (MCMC), and Volterra recipes.
My view of the HP deal is that a large company bought a smaller company. The larger company then had buyer’s remorse. The larger company is trying to get its money back.
The international accounting rules, the post purchase audit, and the realization that search and content processing are not trivialities surprises some.
The dust up is fascinating, and I anticipate more to and fro. As my Xenky report shows, Autonomy disrupted the enterprise search sector consistently until it was acquired by HP. Does Mr. Lynch deserve credit for his ability to make competitors work overtime to match Autonomy’s market performance?
I am going to say, “Yes.” International Business Times would answer with another tasteless reference to “skidmarks.” Even in the hands of another firm, Autonomy evokes strong reactions. I prefer my Xenky report approach.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2014
Budget Airline Ryanair Added to Google Flight Search
February 5, 2014
An article titled Google to Revamp its Flight Search Engine, Ryanair’s CEO Says on ComputerWorld reports on a interview of Michael O’Leary, CEO of budget airline Ryanair. Leary’s interview also included the following insights into the addition of Ryanair into Google’s Flight Search.
The article states:
“According to O’Leary, Google wants to provide route selections as well as cheapest prices of all the airlines. Whoever selects a trip will be able to click on the fares to be led to an airline’s website to purchase tickets, he said. Ryanair’s data will be added to Google’s database in March. The addition of Ryanair, once a fierce opponent of price comparison sites, to Flight Search will absolutely benefit Google, said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Hudson Crossing.”
Competitors such as Skyscanner and Kayak will not be overly hurt by Google’s gain, Hartveldt surmises, since they also offer travel services such as car rentals and hotel options. A spokesperson for Google dampened any of O’Leary’s grandiose language of a revamp, stating that Ryanair was simply being added to the service. Meanwhile Google’s Flight Search (which was launched in 2011 and came to the UK in 2013) has come under fire in Europe for having no travel agency links. Expedia and TripAdvisor filed an antitrust complaint in 2012 with the European Commission, claiming that Google’s search engine gives an unfair advantage to its own services.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Topology and Big Data Making Shapes
February 5, 2014
The article titled Lawrence Livermore Explores the Shape of Data, Expanding Query-Free Analytics on GCN delves into the work of the Livermore National Laboratory in partnership with Ayasdi Inc. Using homegrown technology, the lab tackles big data to analyze various areas of research such as climate change, national security and biological defense. Recently their work has begun to incorporate topology, the study of shapes.
The article explains the connection:
“The fundamental idea is that topological methods act as a geometric approach to pattern or shape recognition within data,” says a September 2013 article in the journal Science co-authored by Ayasdi CEO Gurjeet Singh. It allows “exploration of the data, without first having to formulate a query or hypothesis.” That is, researchers can find things they did not know they were looking for. For instance, in a database of billions upon billions of phone records scientists could make sense of who was talking to whom.”
Such complicated shapes are almost impossible for people living in 3D to even imagine. But the practical applications seem endless. Stanford University began the research that resulted in TDA in the 1970’s, and received $10 million from NSF and DARPA in 2003. Five years later Ayasdi was founded for commercial use of the TDA software, which is offered as a cloud-based service.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The State Server Side and Client Side Software
February 5, 2014
Software in 2014, the article on the blog Tbray.org offers a state of the software construction. The overall news is positive from the article, with satisfied server developers and good tools for constructing software. The question the article poses is where 2014 will lead in terms of client-side software, and the answer is uncertain. The article suggests that HTTP is universally acceptable and easy to use while almost everything is “built with an MVC or equivalent level of abstraction” in spite of some apps still being created in PHP and Spring. The article posits that storage options are also multiple and strong. However, it also gets into the client-side difficulties the industry faces in the coming years.
The article states:
“When I said “Mobile sucks”, I wasn’t talking about engineering suckage… Crucially, for most of the things you’d want to put in a UI, there’s usually a single canonical solid well-debugged way to do it, which is the top result for the appropriate question on both Google and StackOverflow. But look at all the energy going into browser tech; surely it’s going to catch up with mobile tech any day now?”
The article offers no easy forecasts for the future of the client side. The redundancies in Web, iOS and Android, the mobile form factors among other mobile issues are all problems without simple answers. We are curious what Tim Bray would say about enterprise search software.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Governance Woes and Solutions
February 5, 2014
SharePoint governance is an important aspect that’s often overlooked. And while developing a plan on the front is often hard and requires a lot of time, having some well-thought-out in place is invaluable. Read more in the Search Content Management article, “SharePoint Governance Plans Doomed Without Business Buy-in.”
The article begins:
“SharePoint implementers are often stymied when attempting to bring discipline to business processes so that SharePoint can be an effective tool in the first place. It’s about bringing order to chaos, noted Sue Hanley, founder and president of Susan Hanley LLC, in her session on developing SharePoint governance plans at SPTechCon 2013 this week. Failure to design information governance into SharePoint implementation plans can lead to deployments that resemble the ‘Wild, Wild West,’ Hanley said.”
Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and the man behind ArnoldIT.com. He spends a lot of attention on SharePoint and governance is not an infrequent topic. If a plan is not in place, extensive customization and fancy training will not do an organization any good. It all begins and ends with a smart plan.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 5, 2014
Autonomy: 1996 to 2006 Free Report Available on Xenky
February 4, 2014
Update: The HP Autonomy deal is back in the news. See “HP Restates Autonomy’s 2010 Revenue Down 54%, Citing Errors.”
Autonomy was one of the first—some may argue the first—enterprise search vendor to embrace Bayesian-Laplace methods and power its way to almost $1 billion in revenues in 15 years. Hewlett Packard bought Autonomy in 2011, and Autonomy remains a high profile information processing brand.
But what gave Autonomy its revenue oomph? Other vendors tried to match Autonomy’s marketing, technology, and indirect sales. Google generated more revenue than Autonomy, but Google sold ads. In the enterprise sector, Google found itself watching Autonomy close deal after deal.
This report combines information from several Autonomy analyses written by Stephen E Arnold, and his research team. A similar report from an azure chip or mid tier consulting firm can cost as much as $3,500. (Four of Mr. Arnold’s reports are on offer at that rate by IDC, one of the perceived leaders in for fee research by independent experts.)
This free 25 page report provides some important historical information and a description of the Autonomy system.
To download a free copy, navigate to the Xenky.com Web site and select Autonomy from the list of 11 free enterprise search vendor profiles. The report is available at http://bit.ly/1boX86v.
Other reports in this free series of historical and analytical white papers are Convera, Dieselpoint, SchemaLogic, and Verity. Each analysis provides useful information about the wise and sometimes ill advised business and technical decisions companies have made.
If you are interested in a more in-depth discussion of select Autonomy patents and its Digital Reasoning Engine’s mathematical methods, write seaky2000 at yahoo dot com. Put Autonomy Report in the subject line. ArnoldIT will reply with details about this expanded Autonomy analysis.
Kenneth Toth, February 4, 2014
Tutorial for ElasticSearch Basic Setup
February 4, 2014
The article on DZone titled Getting Started With ElasticSearch offers a step-by-step guide to the search engine to fill the hole in tutorials. The author promises that by the end of reading the post the user will be armed with the tools to begin working with ElasticSearch in Windows 7. The instructions begin with the assumption that the user already has Java installed.
After downloading ElasticSearch, the tutorial explains:
“I am new to Curl and cygwin and i wanted to cut short the time frame to learn it (as most of the command references on ElasticSearch.org are for non-Windows platform). You can install Curl from http://curl.haxx.se/download.html and cygwin from http://cygwin.com/install.html. Now let’s test what we have done till now. In Windows7 Desktop Environment, start command line and cd C:\elasticsearch-0.90.3\bin. Now execute elasticsearch.bat. This will start one of the ElasticSearch nodes on the localhost.”
After a few more steps, the article concludes with the information that status 200 simply means everything is working. The tutorial continues with installing elasticsearch-head plugin into your environment and finally developing an application for employees within a department. The details are well worth looking over in order to get ElasticSearch jumpstarted and to get users working on their search projects.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 04, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Watson Has Difficulty Translating to the Cloud
February 4, 2014
IBM’s Watson is proceeding to the cloud. Apparently, though, the journey is proving more challenging than expected. The Register reports, “IBM’s Watson-as-a-Cloud: Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? No, it’s Another Mainframe.” Writer Jack Clark peers through the marketing hype, maintaining that Watson does not translate to the cloud as easily as IBM would have us believe.
The key to Watson’s functionality is its DeepQA analysis engine, which uses an amalgam of Apache‘s Hadoop, Apache’s UIMA, and other tools to achieve machine learning. This means, says Clark, that more work than one might expect must be done to get set up with the cloudy Watson.
He specifies:
“Applying DeepQA to any new domain requires adaptation in three areas:
*Content adaptation involves organizing the domain content for hypothesis and evidence generation, modeling the context in which questions will be generated
*Training adaptation involves adding data in the form of sample training questions and correct answers from the target domain so that the system can learn appropriate weights for its components when estimating answer confidence
*Functional adaptation involves adding new domain-specific question analysis, candidate generation, hypothesis scoring and other components.
Think of a mainframe. Watson seems a lot like one of those, as it preferences long-term relationships, an undisclosed financial outlay, and lock-in-by-default as this technology is only fielded by IBM. That’s not a terribly bad thing, mind, as for some organisations a tool like this could be useful. But it does mean you are right to be sceptical when IBM starts portraying Watson as a cloud product that’s is easy to get started with.”
The article reports that IBM is working on a lab that will help firms in Silicon Valley craft Watson-related apps. That may lead to easier transitions in the future, but in the meantime, any company considering adopting Watson-as-a-cloud should go in understanding that there will be much work to do before reaping the benefits of the famous AI’s wisdom.
Cynthia Murrell, February 04, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
PageZepher Desktop Search Good for Publishing Formats
February 4, 2014
Here is a search and conversion tool that bridges a gap to make working with certain data much easier. Markzware has created PageZephyr, a desktop solution that can even index the proprietary publishing formats of QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, and MS Publisher. The product’s page includes a handy, three-minute video highlighting some of the solution’s functionality.
The list of features specifies:
- Index content easily within Apple Macintosh storage volumes.
- Desktop Search within Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and Microsoft Publisher files.
- Edit content from search results within a convenient Storyboard Window.
- Extract content from multiple documents simultaneously.
- Export content to rich text format RTF or a plain text TXT file.
- Publish and distribute content to the internet using output options to blog sites like WordPress, Google *Docs, Scribd, and Box.net.
- Supports Microsoft Publisher 2002 – 2010, QuarkXPress 4 – 9 and InDesign CS – CS6 file types.
- PageZephyr does not require Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress or Microsoft Publisher.
As this list points out, users of PageZephyr don’t need to have those publishing applications installed in order to find, view, or modify documents. The ability to edit any content within, and export it from, the platform is a handy feature.
Founded in 1992, Markzware is also the maker of the successful FlightCheck pre-print quality control software. The company emphasizes ease of use and day-to-day labor reduction, and also works to minimize its environmental impact. Markzware USA is headquartered in Santa Ana, California, and the spun-off Markzware Europe makes its home in Pijnacker, Netherlands.
Cynthia Murrell, February 04, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Metalogix Offers SharePoint Migration Tool
February 4, 2014
SharePoint migration is a consistent problem among SharePoint users. Large updates occur on the Microsoft schedule of every three years and are disruptive at best, devastating at worst. Metalogix is hoping to help tackle this problem with their new product. Read more in the GCN article, “Metalogix Tool Reduces Risk and Cost of SharePoint Upgrades.”
The article begins:
“Preparing for and conducting a platform or software upgrade can be expensive, time-consuming and disruptive for government agencies. Administrators need a clear picture of the current potential risks before they begin a migration of important content. To help agencies better prepare for inevitable upgrades, Metalogix added a new tool to its suite of SharePoint applications that can help administrators reduce the risk and cost associated with migrations in SharePoint.”
Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and often writes on ArnoldIT.com about the latest SharePoint trends and troubles. It is clear from the media coverage that SharePoint isn’t going away, and yet users are clear about their frustration on a number of levels. Metalogix hopes to seize upon both angles and help existing SharePoint customers migrate stress-free.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 4, 2014
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