RAVN: SOLR Search and Autonomy Services
March 22, 2014
My Overflight system flagged news about RAVN’s enterprise search and DocAuto, a company that “makes matter-centricity, email management, IDOL management, and other content management operations flexible, seamless, and secure. I must admit I was not sure what DocAuto did. I have a fleeting recollection of learning about RAVN when I was at a very disorganized enterprise search conference in London in 2013. I don’t know if the conference was in a tizzy or whether the speakers were suffering from jet lag.
RAVN’s Web site asserts that the company delivers “the power of understanding.” I’m okay with tag lines. I am not exactly sure what “understanding” means in the RAVN context, but most outfits offering “enterprise search” use words that sound like they are full of freight. I ask questions like “What is understanding?” and chuckle as I listen to the marketer explain “understanding” to me. Most of these folks are not epistemologists, however.
RAVN’s Web site offers solutions for Big Data, the power of understanding, real time understanding, and knowledge management. I am not sure what any of these buzzwords means. I write a column for KMWorld, and, truth be told, I have absolutely no idea about the meaning of “knowledge” or, for that matter, “management.” I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton—at one time one of the world’s leading management consulting firms—and I never understood what “management” meant. I think it was a way to bill client for 20 somethings to do outsourced work. Don’t hold me to this idea because at age 70, the past grows more hazy with each passing day.
The capabilities of RAVN include a knowledge graph, enterprise search, an expert locator, sentiment, and core. I clicked on the enterprise search link and and learned:
The words explaining this diagram embraced “connecting to and unifying diverse content repositories.” I think that means “federated search. RAVN “surfaces results in meaningful ways.” I am not sure what this means. RAVN search delivers relevance ranking, “enterprise scale content security,” enterprise search “scalability,” and “performance.”
The firm offers a power of understanding approach and provides a short video explaining how I can “harness the power of understanding.” The video replaces chaos with structure. The system learns the user’s interests. RAVN puts a user ahead of the competition. RAVN handles text, audio, video, and knowledge.
This manual work is not good.
The automatic RAVN system is good.
RAVN offers a core, a knowledge graph, and SharePoint support.
The company’s services include support for Autonomy IDOL, which appears to have influenced the bold assertions about RAVN’s own search system, and SOLR. My hunch is that RAVN will provide an open source solution with some connectors and software wrappers.
I will keep my eye on RAVN search. For now, the company is in buzzword marketing mode.
Stephen E Arnold, March 22, 2014
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