JustSystems in Flux?
March 8, 2010
I received a call about JustSystems, the Japanese company that figured out how to enter complex characters using a three digit code from a mobile phone keypad. A deal with a large mobile device company was the firm’s go-to revenue stream. With changes in mobile technology, that revenue began to dwindle. JustSystems turned to software development and consulting, which are difficult businesses to scale. When I visited the company for my key fob I noted that the firm had more than 500 employees in several locations. The information I reviewed this morning suggested that JustSystems had about 900 employees at the end of 2009.
The firm was of interest to me. I received a Japanese dinner and a key fob after giving a briefing to the company’s owners four or five years ago. I also reported in my story “JustSystems ConceptBase” that the company rolled out a search appliance in some sort of tie up with IBM.
I dug through my files and noticed a data point that I wanted to surface. In April 2009, JustSystems became a subsidiary of the Keyence Corporation. (Asiajin reported this story in April 2009.) Keyence makes a wide range of electronic gizmos. JustSystems pushed into search and content processing, purchasing a US content processing company called Clairvoyance, founded by wizard Dr. David A Evans. The push did not work and the company turned to Keyence, which bought 43.96 percent of JustSystems, valued at a about US$50 million. Six months later in 2009, the founders–Kazunori Ukigawa and Hatsuko Ukigawa, a husband and wife team—resigned as chairman and vice chairperson and quit the Board of Directors. Mrs. Unkgawa was one of the most visible female Japanese company heads in a very male Japanese technology sector.
On Friday, I was able to speak to a customer support representative on the firm’s North American hot line. I was not able to get much information about the status of the products, particularly the search appliance. I asked about the office in Pittsburgh, where Clairvoyance was located. I learned that the Pittsburgh office had been closed.
JustSystems is hosting Webinars and publicizing that it is one of the 100 firms identified as a “company that matters” by the prestigious, widely read KMWorld Magazine. The company lists as its customers, Amazon, Thomson, Symantec, Cisco, WIPO, Jaguar, and other high profile firms.
The company’s flagship product is XMetal and the firm offers a “maturity model” for an enterprise “semantic ecosystem.”
Several observations:
- JSERI–the original Claritech – Clairvoyance – JustSystems Evans Research–seems to have shut down. See drakesbaycompany.com/documents/JSERI_ExecSummary.pdf
- The USPTO published in November 2009 US, “Methods and Apparatus for Interactive Document Clustering.” The assignee is JustSystems Evans Research. The Wikipedia entry is here.
- There is no search function on the company’s English language Web site. A quick look at the Japanese site and I was not able to locate a search function. When I search Keyence’s Web site for the ConceptBase I got zero hits. Maybe the appliance is a goner?
To sum up, I don’t know if the ConceptBase appliance is currently for sale. I will keep poking around.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I did get paid to go to Tokyo to get my JustSystems key fob. I suppose that counts for something.
Automated Reports May Squeeze Azure Chip Consultants
March 3, 2010
On Mach 1, 2010, I heard an interesting presentation by Alacra. This company aggregates business information and packages it in an easy-to-read way. The talk focused on Alacra Pulse. The basics of the service as I recorded the speaker’s comments are:
The Alacra Pulse Platform monitors thousands of carefully selected news feeds and blogs and extracts actionable intelligence in near-real-time. Alacra’s Applied Knowledge Extraction turns Web content into an idea generation and current awareness service for financial professionals and corporate executives.
The Pulse service offers a free version and a premium version. I thought the demonstration of the free version was quite good, and it certainly shows how far automated content assembly has come in the last two or three years. You can explore the service yourself. Navigate to http://pulse.alacra.com/analyst-comments to get started.
Right after listening to the Alacra talk, I read a news release about “New Market Report Now Available: Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited – SWOT Analysis” from an azure chip outfit called Datamonitor. Now Hon Hai Precision, if I recall correctly, is a unit of Foxconn. Foxconn makes stuff for “hollow manufacturers.” The idea is that a company like Apple or Dell does not have the expertise or cost structure to make things. Foxconn and Hon Hoi do. The buzzword for lacking a core competency in manufacturing is outsourcing in my opinion. Foxconn is interesting because of a glitch in Apple related security and an employee death.
I think I prefer the autogenerated reports from Alacra, thank you. Image sourcehttp://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Hs_cKZPkvaU/Sxshr9-foYI/AAAAAAAAAG4/ZtHNfWYGEIE/s400/sleazy-salesman-thumb.jpg:
The azure chip crowd assembles reports, presumably like the Hon Hoi “SWOT” analysis using basic business school methods, which may or may not be germane to the present financial climate. Here’s what the news release said:
Datamonitor’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited – SWOT Analysis company profile is the essential source for top-level company data and information. Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited – SWOT Analysis examines the company’s key business structure and operations, history and products, and provides summary analysis of its key revenue lines and strategy.
Would you trust your retirement savings to anyone relying upon an off the shelf, MBA’s SWOT analysis in today’s real time world? I would not.
But several more important questions crossed my mind.
First, why would I pay for a profile when I could get the basic information from Alacra? Furthermore, when I get the Alacra report, it is (as I recall the speaker’s saying) generated in real time. No delay between my request and getting the freshest data. I am reasonably capable can can formulate my own views of a company from fresh data if what I saw from Alacra is indicative of what the company provides in its Pulse service.
Second, assume I don’t know about Alacra. Why not use a federating search system such as Devilfinder.com, Ixquick.com, or Vivisimo.com? There are even more interesting federating systems to tap, including Bright Planet and Deep Web Technologies. I understand laziness, but these services can deliver the basic information that provides a manager with direct links to some publicly available, quite useful reports about the company; for example, the Google Finance or the AOL company report.
Third, if I * really * want to do a good job, perhaps my firm should look into industrial strength solutions from Kapow Technologies or Kroll Ontrack? Let’s face it. Buying an off-the-shelf report chock full of business school jargon may not be what’s needed to deal with a business decision in today’s economic climate.
My opinion is that as outfits like Alacra and Google roll out more reports generated by “smart” software, the pressure will mount on the azure chip consulting crowd. Already pressured from below by the likes of Gerson Lehrman Group and from above from the blue chip outfits like McKinsey & Co, the azure chip outfits will be like the cheese and salami in a Panini, feel heat and pressure from two places at once.
My thought is that canny business executives may want to check out services like Pulse, familiarize themselves with federating search systems, consider an industrial strength solution that operates in near real time, or just sign up for a pay as you consulting service from Gerson Lehrman. In short, do something other than buying the Cliff’s Notes for executives who are lazy like this addled goose. In short, the middle may be an uncomfortable place for self appointed experts, poobahs, and mavens writing reports about Chinese businesses using English language sources. Yep, Cliff’s Notes for Harried Executives?
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2010
No one paid me to write this. Since I mentioned myself as a lazy goose, I will report non paid writing to Fish & Wildlife, an outfit that does a stellar job scheduling rooms at national parts and monitoring the health of geese in the US.
EasyAsk: NLP, SQL, and MDX
February 25, 2010
A reader sent me a link to DataPrix’s write up about EasyAsk as a business intelligence tool. Now owned by Progress Software, EasyAsk has dropped off my radar. My recollection is that the system supported search, facets, and eCommerce. I did wonder why Endeca did not crack down on EasyAsk’s use of the phrase “guided navigation”, but I may have mixed up which marketer cooked up which phrase. I had pegged as a system for searching structured data. DataPrix’s article positions EasyAsk as a business intelligence tool. The screen shots show the system generating the type of output that I associate with companies such as Megaputer, based on math magic from Moscow-based wizards.
Source: http://www.dataprix.com/node/1068
EasyAsk supports reporting, analysis, and scorecards (dashboards). The user formulates a query and the EasyAsk system retrieves the data and generates an answer. The query can be expressed in natural language, so the EasyAsk approach obviates the need for a goose like me to create a well formed query against a properly formed cube.
The DataPrix write up suggests that EasyAsk can be used to perform search and retrieval plus the more sophisticated queries against large structured data sets. EasyAsk added support for mainstream databases years ago. EasyAsk can also generate a user’s query in MDX (multi dimensional expressions), a favorite of end users who majored in business and then jumped into sales.
DataPrix provided a link to a demonstration of the system with which I was not familiar. You can check it out at http://www.easyask.com/demo.html.
How does EasyAsk stack up against SAS and Megaputer? I don’t know the answer to that question. I quite like Megaputer. Those Russian math dudes are in the flow in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, February 25, 2010
Nope, nope. Not paid. I will report a failure to receive money for this article and its frisky reference to undergrads with degrees in business and extensive sales training. The agency to which I am reporting is the Census Bureau. No explanation needed.
Internet Metrics
February 24, 2010
One of my goslings submitted a write up about Internet Metrics. Here’s his item to me:
*The data came from Defensetech.org, a military.com site about “how technology is shaping how wars are fought, borders are protected, crooks are caught and individual rights are defined.”
In 2009, there were 90 trillion e-mails sent over the Internet with an estimated 81 percent being spam. There were over one trillion unique URLs in Google’s index. YouTube served over one billion videos per day, on average. There were over 47 million new Web sites added.
By the end of 2010, there will be over 1.9 billion Internet users worldwide. The volume of daily email will be greater than 100 billion messages per day. There will be over 3.3 billion cell phones users with Internet access. We sites will jump to more than 265 million. The number of blogs will hit 130 million.
Ignore that, if you can.
The challenges of the internet, its social networking implications and our fast-evolving digital world are more than shared by today’s marketers. They are also a first line of defense concern, as you can imagine. And like a run-away train, it will not be stopped.
That, my friends, is the world we live in. A little scary, isn’t it? But (and I have been waiting so very many years to use this poem that I was forced to memorize as a high school freshman), “If we buckle right in, with a bit of a grin… without any doubting or ‘quit-it. If we tackle this thing that can not be done… we’ll soon be able to say, ‘We did it!’“
So if you need impetus to ‘buckle right in,’ consider yourself pushed.
Jerry Constantino, February 24, 2010
ArnoldIT.com paid Mr. Constantino for his write up.
Twitter and Mining Tweets
February 21, 2010
I must admit. I get confused. There is Twitter, TWIT (a podcast network), TWIST (a podcast from another me-too outfit), and “tweets”. If I am confused, imagine the challenge for text processing and then analyzing short messages.
Without context, a brief text message can be opaque to someone my age; for example, “r u thr”. Other messages say one thing, “at the place, 5” and mean to an insider “Mary’s parents are out of town. The party is at Mary’s house at 5 pm.”
When I read “Twitter’s Plan to Analyze 100 Billion Tweets”, several thoughts struck me:
- What took so long?
- Twitter is venturing into some tricky computational thickets. Analyzing tweets (the word given to 140 character messages sent via Twitter and not to be confused with “twits”, members of the TWIT podcast network) is not easy.
- Non US law enforcement and intelligence professionals will be paying a bit more attention to the Twitter analyses because Twitter’s own outputs may be better, faster, and cheaper than setting up exotic tweet subsystems.
- Twitter makes clear that it has not analyzed its own data stream, which surprises me. I thought these young wizards were on top of data flows, not sitting back and just reacting to whatever happens.
According to the article, “Twitter is the nervous system of the Web.” This is a hypothetical, and I am not sure I buy that assertion. My view is that Google’s more diverse data flows are more useful. In fact, the metadata generated by observing flows within Buzz and Wave are potentially a leapfrog. Twitter is a bit like one of those Faith Popcorn-type of projects. Sniffing is different from getting the rare sirloin in a three star eatery in Lyon.
The write up points out that Twitter will use open source tools for the job. There are some juicy details of how Twitter will process the traffic.
A useful write up.
Stephen E Arnold, February 22, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. I will report non payment to the Department of Labor, where many are paid for every lick of work.
Global ETM Dives into Enterprise Search Intelligence
February 18, 2010
Stephen E Arnold has entered into an agreement with Global Enterprise Technology Management, an information and professional services company in the UK. Mr. Arnold has created a special focus page about enterprise search on the Global ETM Web site. The page is now available, and it features:
- A summary of the principal market sectors in enterprise search and content processing. More than a dozen sectors are identified. Each sector is plotted in a grid using Mr. Arnold’s Knowledge-Value Methodology. You can see at a glance which search sectors command higher and lower Knowledge Value to organizations. (Some of the Knowledge Value Methodology was described in Martin White’s and Stephen E. Arnold’s 2009 study Successful Enterprise Search Management.
- A table provides a brief description of each of the search market sectors and includes hot links to representative vendors with products and services for that respective market sector. More than 30 vendors are identified in this initial special focus page.
- The page includes a selected list of major trends in enterprise search and content processing.
Mr. Arnold will be adding content to this Web page on a weekly schedule.
Information about GlobalETM is available from the firm’s Web site.
Stuart Schram IV, February 18, 2010
I am paid by ArnoldIT.com, so this is a for-fee post.
Sinequa Cozies Up to Actuaries
February 10, 2010
Short honk: A happy quack to the team at Sinequa. The company landed a deal with the US benefits consulting outfit, Mercer. Chock full of actuaries, Mercer provides benefits-related services, an arcane area that baffles the addled goose. According to the information provided to Beyond Search,
Sinequa Enterprise Search will boost Mercer’s productivity, making employees more efficient by enabling them to quickly find relevant information and leverage intellectual capital across the organization. The initial phase of the project has been deployed in the UK, where Mercer has 3,000 employees and an intellectual capital alone consisting of more than 30 million documents. Mercer had previously implemented both desktop and intranet search solutions. However, these disparate search solutions fueled the need for a single unified enterprise search solution.
You can get more information about Sinequa at http://www.sinequa.com. An interview with the managing director of Sinequa is available in the Search Wizards Speak series.
Facebook Scores Another Gain
February 9, 2010
This Facebook site continues to surprise me. Addled geese do not have too many friends. Our SSN Blog has a Facebook presence, but the addled goose leaves that to a couple of talented goslings; namely, Lauren and Sam. When I read “Facebook Overtakes Google News as Media Site Traffic Driver”, I made a note to myself to ask Lauren and Sam, “What’s with this Facebook craziness?” Publishers have been chasing Google, and now it seems that the Web ecosystem has spawned a more problematic recycling of “real journalism”. Humans. The Google is anchored in numerical recipes. Facebook is anchored in humans. Big difference. In my view, it might prove more challenging to corral people than humans, but I could be wrong.
The most interesting comment in the article in my opinion was:
Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn, according to Hitwise. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits to News and Media websites, and Facebook accounted for 3.52%. That’s a big shift since last April, when they were about equal.
The article includes a nifty chart and it embeds in its white space this question, “How will publishers deal with a threat from people?” Some of these folks may be the progeny of publishers and real journalists. An issue of interest is this.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. Sigh. I will report non payment to the Department of Commerce which is eager to jump start struggling businesses. Maybe there will be a government subsidy for addled geese.
Quote to Note: Dick Brass on MSFT Innovation
February 6, 2010
I met Dick Brass many years ago. He left Oracle and joining Microsoft to contribute to a confidential initiative. Mr. Brass worked on the ill-fated Microsoft tablet, which Steve Jobs has reinvented as a revolutionary device. I am not a tablet guy, but one thing is certain. Mr. Jobs knows how to work public relations. Mr. Brass published an article in the New York Times, and it captured the attention of Microsoft and millions of readers who enjoyed Mr. Brass’s criticism of his former employer. I have no opinion about Microsoft, its administrative methods, or its ability to innovate. I did find a quote to note in the write up:
Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting edge place to work. There has been a steady exist of its best and brightest. (“Microsoft’s Creative Destruction”, the New York Times, February 4, 2010, Page 25, column 3, National Edition)
Telling because if smart people don’t work at a company, that company is likely to make less informed decisions than an organization with smarter people. This applies in the consulting world. There are blue chip outfits like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG). Then there are lesser outfits which I am sure you can name because these companies “advertise”, have sales people who “sell” listings, and invent crazy phrases to to create buzz and sales. I am tempted to differentiate Microsoft with a reference to Apple or Google, but I will not. Oh, why did I not post this item before today. The hard copy of my New York Times was not delivered until today. Speed is important in today’s information world.
The quote nails it.
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2010
No one paid me to write this, not a single blue chip consulting firm, not a single savvy company. I will report this lack of compensation to the experts at the IRS, which is gearing up for the big day in April.
* Featured
* Interviews
* Profiles
Featured
Microsoft and Mikojo Trigger Semantic Winds across Search Landscape
Semantic technology is blowing across the search landscape again. The word “semantic” and its use in phrases like “semantic technology” has a certain trendiness. When I see the word, I think of smart software that understands information in the way a human does. I also think of computationally sluggish processes and the complexity of language, particularly in synthetic languages like English. Google has considerable investment in semantic technology, but the company wisely tucks it away within larger systems and avoiding the technical battles that rage among different semantic technology factions. You can see Google’s semantic operations tucked within the Ramanathan Guha inventions disclosed in February 2007. Pay attention to the discussion of the system and method for “context”.
image
Gale force winds from semantic technology advocates. Image source: http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2008/11/08/paloma_wideweb__470×289,0.jpg
Microsoft’s Semantic Puff
Other companies are pushing the semantic shock troops forward. I read yesterday in Network World’s “Microsoft Talks Up Semantic Search Ambitions.” The article reminded me that Fast Search & Transfer SA offered some semantic functionality which I summarized in the 2006 version of the original Enterprise Search Report (the one with real beef, not tofu inside). Microsoft also purchased Powerset, a company that used some of Xerox PARC’s technology and its own wizardry to “understand” queries and create a rich index. The Network World story reported:
With semantic technologies, which also are being to referred to as Web 3.0, computers have a greater understanding of relationships between different information, rather than just forwarding links based on keyword searches. The end game for semantic search is “better, faster, cheaper, essentially,” said Prevost, who came over to Microsoft in the company’s 2008 acquisition of search engine vendor Powerset. Prevost is still general manager of Powerset. Semantic capabilities get users more relevant information and help them accomplish tasks and make decisions, said Prevost.
The payoff is that software understands humans. Sounds good, but it does little to alter the startling dominance of Google in general Web search and the rocket like rise of social search systems like Facebook. In a social context humans tell “friends” about meaning or better yet offer an answer or a relevant link. No search required.
I reported about the complexities of configuring the enterprise search system that Microsoft offers for SharePoint in an earlier Web log post. The challenge is complexity and the time and money required to make a “smart” software system perform to an acceptable level in terms of throughput in content processing and for the user. Users often prefer to ask someone or just use what appears in the top of a search results list.
Read more »
Interviews
Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 2
This is the second part of the interview with Raymond Bentinck of Exalead.
Isn’t this bad marketing?
No. This makes business sense.Traditional search vendors who may claim to have thousands of customers tend to use only a handful of well managed references. This is a direct result of customers choosing technology based on these overblown marketing claims and these claims then driving requirements that the vendor’s consultants struggle to deliver. The customer who is then far from happy with the results, doesn’t do reference calls and ultimately becomes disillusioned with search in general or with the vendor specifically. Either way, they end up moving to an alternative.
I see this all the time with our clients that have replaced their legacy search solution with Exalead. When we started, we were met with much skepticism from clients that we could answer their information retrieval problems. It was only after doing Proof of Concepts and delivering the solutions that they became convinced. Now that our reputation has grown organizations realize that we do not make unsubstantiated claims and do stick by our promises.
What about the shift to hybrid solutions? An appliance or an on premises server, then a cloud component, and maybe some fairy dust thrown in to handle the security issues?
There is a major change that is happening within Information Technology at the moment driven primarily by the demands placed on IT by the business. Businesses want to vastly reduce the operational cost models of IT provision while pushing IT to be far more agile in their support of the business. Against this backdrop, information volumes continue to grow exponentially.
The push towards areas such as virtual servers and cloud computing are aspects of reducing the operational cost models of information technology provision. It is fundamental that software solutions can operate in these environments. It is surprising, however, to find that many traditional search vendors solutions do not even work in a virtual server environment.
Isn’t this approach going to add costs to an Exalead installation?
No, because another aspect of this is that software solutions need to be designed to make the best use of available hardware resources. When Exalead provided a solution to the leading classified ads site Fish4.co.uk, unlike the legacy search solution we replaced, not only were we able to deploy a solution that met and exceeded their requirements but we reduced the cost of search to the business by 250 percent. A large part of this was around the massively reduced hardware costs associated with the solution.
What about making changes and responding quickly? Many search vendors simply impose a six month or nine month cycle on a deployment. The client wants to move quickly, but the vendor cannot work quickly.
Agility is another key factor. In the past, an organization may implement a data warehouse. This would take around 12 to 18 months to deploy and would cost a huge amount in hardware, software and consultancy fees. As part of the deployment the consultants needed to second guess the questions the business would want to ask of the data warehouse and design these into the system. After the 12 to 18 months, the business would start using the data warehouse and then find out they needed to ask different types of questions than were designed into the system. The data warehouse would then go through a phase of redevelopment which would last many more months. The business would evolve… making more changes and the cycle would go on and on.
With Exalead, we are able to deploy the same solution in a couple months but significantly there is no need to second guess the questions that the business would want to ask and design them into the system.
This is the sort of agile solution that businesses have been pushing their IT departments to deliver for years. Businesses that do not provide agile IT solutions will fall behind their competitors and be unable to react quickly enough when the market changes.
One of the large UK search vendors has dozens of niche versions of its product. How can that company keep each of these specialty products up to date and working? Integration is often the big problem, is it not?
The founders of Exalead took two years before starting the company to research what worked in search and why the existing search vendors products were so complex. This research led them to understand that the search products that were on the marketplace at the time all started as quite simple products designed to work on relatively low volumes of information and with very limited functional capabilities. Over the years, new functionality has been added to the solutions to keep abreast of what competitors have offered but because of how the products were originally engineered they have not been clean integrations. They did not start out with this intention but search has evolved in ways never imagined at the time these solutions were originally engineered.
Wasn’t one of the key architects part of the famous AltaVista.com team?
Yes. In fact, both of the founders of Exalead were from this team.
What kind of issues occur with these overly complex products?
As you know, this has caused many issues for both vendors and clients. Changes in one part of the solution can cause unwanted side effects in another part. Trying to track down issues and bugs can take a huge amount of time and expense. This is a major factor as to why we see the legacy search products on the market today that are complex, expensive and take many months if not years to deploy even for simple requirements.
Exalead learned from these lessons when engineering our solution. We have an architecture that is fully object-orientated at the core and follows an SOA architecture. It means that we can swap in and out new modules without messy integrations. We can also take core modules such as connectors to repositories and instead of having to re-write them to meet specific requirements we can override various capabilities in the classes. This means that the majority of the code that has gone through our quality-management systems remains the same. If an issue is identified in the code, it is a simple task to locate the problem and this issue is isolated in one area of the code base. In the past, vendors have had to rewrite core components like connectors to meet customers’ requirements and this has caused huge quality and support issues for both the customer and the vendor.
What about integration? That’s a killer for many vendors in my experience.
The added advantage of this core engineering work means that for Exalead integration is a simple task. For example, building new secure connectors to new repositories can be performed in weeks rather than months. Our engineers can take this time saved to spend on adding new and innovative capabilities into the solution rather than spending time worrying about how to integrate a new function without affecting the 1001 other overlaying functions.
Without this model, legacy vendors have to continually provide point-solutions to problems that tend to be customer-specific leading to a very expensive support headache as core engineering changes take too long and are too hard to deploy.
I heard about a large firm in the US that has invested significant sums in retooling Lucene. The solution has been described on the firm’s Web site, but I don’t see how that engineering cost is offset by the time to market that the fix required. Do you see open source as a problem or a solution?
I do not wake up in the middle of the night worrying about Lucene if that is what you are thinking! I see Lucene in places that have typically large engineering teams to protect or by consultants more interested in making lots of fees through its complex integration. Neither of which adds value to the company in, for example, reducing costs of increasing revenue.
Organizations that are interested in providing cost effective richly functional solutions are in increasing numbers choosing solutions like Exalead. For example, The University of Sunderland wanted to replace their Google Search Appliance with a richer, more functional search tool. They looked at the marketplace and chose Exalead for searching their external site, their internal document repositories plus providing business intelligence solutions over their database applications such as student attendance records. The search on their website was developed in a single day including the integration to their existing user interface and the faceted navigation capabilities. This represented not only an exceptionally quick implementation, far in excess of any other solution on the marketplace today but it also delivered for them the lowest total cost of ownership compared to other vendors and of course open-source.
In my opinion, Lucene and other open-source offerings can offer a solution for some organizations but many jump on this bandwagon without fully appreciating the differences between the open source solution and the commercially available solutions either in terms of capability or total cost. It is assumed, wrongly in many instances, that the total cost of ownership for open source must be lower than the commercially available solutions. I would suggest that all too often, open source search is adopted by those who believe the consultants who say that search is a simple commodity problem.
What about the commercial enterprise that has had several search systems and none of them capable of delivering satisfactory solutions? What’s the cause of this? The vendors? The client’s approach?
I think the problem lies more with the vendors of the legacy search solutions than with the clients. Vendors have believed their own marketing messages and when customers are unsatisfied with the results have tended to blame the customers not understanding how to deploy the product correctly or in some cases, the third-party or system integrator responsible for the deployment.
One client of ours told me recently that with our solution they were able to deliver in a couple months what they failed to do with another leading search solution for seven years. This is pretty much the experience of every customer where we have replaced an existing search solution. In fact, every organization that I have worked with that has performed an in-depth analysis and comparison of our technology against any search solution has chosen Exalead.
In many ways, I see our solution as not only delivering on our promises but also delivering on the marketing messages that our competitors have been promoting for years but failing to deliver in reality.
So where does Exalead fit? The last demo I received showed me search working within a very large, global business process. The information just appeared? Is this where search is heading?
In the year 2000, and every year since, a CEO of one of the leading legacy search vendors made a claim that every major organization would be using their brand of meaning based search technology within two years.
I will not be as bold as him but it is my belief that in less than five years time the majority of organizations will be using search based applications in mission critical applications.
For too long software vendors have been trying to convince organizations, for example, that it was not possible to deploy mission critical solutions such as customer 360 degree customer view, Master Data Management, Data Warehousing or business intelligence solutions in a couple months, with no user training, with with up-to-the-minute information, with user friendly interfaces, with a low cost per query covering millions or billions of records of information.
With Exalead this is possible and we have proven it in some of the world’s largest companies.
How does this change the present understanding of search, which in my opinion is often quite shallow?
Two things are required to change the status quo.
Firstly, a disruptive technology is required that can deliver on these requirements and secondly businesses need to demand new methods of meeting ever greater business requirements on information.
Today I see both these things in place. Exalead has proven that our solutions can meet the most demanding of mission critical requirements in an agile way and now IT departments are realizing that they cannot support their businesses moving forward by using traditional technologies.
What do you see as the trends in enterprise search for 2010?
Last year was a turning point around Search Based Applications. With the world-wide economy in recession, many companies have put projects on hold until things were looking better. With economies still looking rather weak but projects not being able to be left on ice for ever, they are starting to question the value of utilizing expensive, time consuming and rigid technologies to deliver these projects.
Search is a game changing technology that can deliver more innovative, agile and cheaper solutions than using traditional technologies. Exalead is there to deliver on this promise.
Search, a commodity solution? No.
Editor’s note: You can learn more about Exalead’s search enable applications technology and method at the Exalead Web site.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
I wrote this post without any compensation. However, Mr. Bentinck, who lives in a far off land, offered to buy me haggis, and I refused this tasty bribe. Ah, lungs! I will report the lack of payment to the National Institutes of Health, an outfit concerned about alveoli.
Profiles
Vyre: Software, Services, Search, and More
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to Vyre, whose catchphrase is “dissolving complexity.” The last time I looked at the company, I had pigeon holed it as a consulting and content management firm. The news release my reader sent me pointed out that the company has a mid market enterprise search solution that is now at version 4.x. I am getting old, or at least too sluggish to keep pace with content management companies that offer search solutions. My recollection is that Crown Point moved in this direction. I have a rather grim view of CMS because software cannot help organizations create high quality content or at least what I think is high quality content.
The Wikipedia description of Vyre matches up with the information in my archive:
VYRE, now based in the UK, is a software development company. The firm uses the catchphrase “Enterprise 2.0? to describe its enterprise solutions for business.The firm’s core product is Unify. The Web based services allows users to build applications and content management. The company has technology that manages digital assets. The firm’s clients in 2006 included Diageo, Sony, Virgin, and Lowe and Partners. The company has reinvented itself several times since the late 1990s doing business as NCD (Northern Communication and Design), Salt, and then Vyre.
You can read Wikipedia summary here. You can read a 2006 Butler Group analysis here. My old link worked this evening (March 5, 2009), but click quickly. In my files I had a link to a Vyre presentation but it was not about search. Dated 2008, you may find the information useful. The Vyre presentations are here. The link worked for me on March 5, 2009. The only name I have in my archive is Dragan Jotic. Other names of people linked to the company are here. Basic information about the company’s Web site is here. Traffic, if these data are correct, seem to be trending down. I don’t have current interface examples. The wiki for the CMS service is here. (Note: the company does not use its own CMS for the wiki. The wiki system is from MedioWiki. No problem for me, but I was curious about this decision because the company offers its own CMS system. You can get a taste of the system here.
image
Administrative Vyre screen.
After a bit of poking around, it appears that Vyre has turned up the heat on its public relations activities. The Seybold Report here presented a news story / news release about the search system here. I scanned the release and noted this passage as interesting for my work:
…version 4.4 introduces powerful new capabilities for performing facetted and federated searching across the enterprise. Facetted search provides immediate feedback on the breakdown of search results and allows users to quickly and accurately drill down within search results. Federated search enables users to eradicate content silos by allowing users to search multiple content repositories.
Vyre includes a taxonomy management function with its search system, if I read the Seybold article correctly. I gravitate to the taxonomy solution available from Access Innovations, a company run by my friend and colleagues Marje Hlava and Jay Ven Eman. Their system generates ANSI standard thesauri and word lists, which is the sort of stuff that revs my engine.
Endeca has been the pioneer in the enterprise sector for “guided navigation” which is a synonym in my mind for faceted search. Federated search gets into the functions that I associated with Bright Planet, Deep Web Technologies, and Vivisimo, among others. I know that shoving large volumes of data through systems that both facetize content and federated it are computationally intensive. Consequently, some organizations are not able to put the plumbing in place to make these computationally intensive systems hum like my grandmother’s sewing machine.
If you are in the market for a CMS and asset management company’s enterprise search solution, give the company’s product a test drive. You can buy a report from UK Data about this company here. I don’t have solid pricing data. My notes to myself record the phrase, “Sensible pricing.” I noted that the typical cost for the system begins at about $25,000. Check with the company for current license fees.
Stephen Arnold, March 6, 2009
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Exalead Reports Banner Year
February 5, 2010
Exalead contacted me after reading the posts about Autonomy and Coveo. The essence of the message from the Paris-based, search-enabled-applications company was,
Despite the economic downturn, Exalead continued its growth in 2009 with a worldwide revenue of $22,7M. Software sales grew by almost 20% in France and by 30% in the US, which is a great source of satisfaction to us. We added 50 new references to our global customer base, achieving a 25% growth. (Exalead source)
I followed up and learned that the experienced a strong demand for its professional services revenues. The company is, according to my Exalead source, a leader in “SBA”. This acronym means search-based applications.
Exalead indexes the Google Web logs on the ArnoldIT.com Web site as part of my team’s effort to provide demonstrations of participating vendors’ technology. You can see the Exalead search system with entity extraction and other features at http://overflight.labs.exalead.com/.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2010
No one paid me to write this short item. I will demand that the Exalead CTO provide me with a Diet Pepsi next time I am in Paris. No wine, please. The goose is an alcohol-free zone, avoids paté, and usually steers clear of CDG. I will report this lack of payment to the Department of State. Bring back American fries!
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