Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 2
February 4, 2010
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.
Inside Search: Raymond Bentinck of Exalead, Part 1
February 3, 2010
Editor’s introduction: Raymond Bentinck (who now works at Exalead) and I have discussed—maybe argued about–search and content processing every month or so for several years. He has deep experience in enterprise software, including stints at Verity, IBM and Oracle.
Our chosen field of intellectual combat for this conversation was a restaurant in Florida. On January 26, 2010, he and I engaged in a discussion of the woes that one-size-fit-all search vendors now face. In Europe, some customers want a single company like SAP to provide a full service solution. But SAP has met strong financial resistance due to the costs of this type of approach. In North America, some pundits have pointed out that the explosion of vendors offering bargain basement eDiscovery and customer support versions of their search and content processing technology represent the a new frontier in search. Other consultants tout the open source search solutions. Still others push appliances or search toasters. The text of our most recent discussion appears below:
Raymond, have you been keeping up with the consultants who are pointing out that search is now the equivalent of a discount store like Wal*Mart or Tesco?
I’ve kept abreast of consultants that say that search is a commodity with some amusement. If you think of search as being the ability to search over a companies Intranet without any security requirements and simply bring back some results with no context to the user’s query then they could be right.
But no sensible consultant would ever describe, being able to provide query and precise results over billions of up-to-the minute records including the ability to analyze the effectiveness of a companies mission critical operations as commodity.
Right, what I call azure chip consultants.
That’s a telling phrase. I think consultants often confuse the clients. This adds to the complexity of the decision process in my opinion.
But let me jump back to this point: Exalead is delivering information solutions for our customers today. The solution uses sophisticated data and content processing methods. Exalead’s approach demonstrates just how far search has progressed in the past few years. I think that the Exalead approach delivers the business intelligence layer to perform analytics on how to improve business moving forward, increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and improve margins.
Isn’t Exalead moving beyond traditional search and retrieval?
Yes and no. If you think of search as retrieval of information, on this basic level is does not really matter whether this data are structured or unstructured. In fact, even at Verity we delivered embryonic solutions around CRM for financial services or conflict checking in legal. However, the legacy search engines, in my opinion, are not capable of delivering solutions for the mainstream because of their lack of functionality and their complexity. Exalead is a new generation of solution that has been designed from the ground up to deliver these capabilities. These sort of mission critical business applications go under the heading of what I call Search Based Applications.
Can you give me an example of a search enabled application?
Certainly. One of Exalead’s clients, for example, replaced a traditional solution provided by Business Objects / SAP and Oracle. There were significant savings in license fees because this customer no longer needed the aging Business Objects system. Other savings resulted from trimming the number of Oracle licenses needed to run the older business intelligence system. The Exalead solution is now used by thousands more users who require no training. Exalead also slashed the latency in the system response time by a factor of 100. A query that once took 60 seconds to process and display, now processes in less than a second on a fully utilized hardware infrastructure. In addition, our solution delivered more functionality, halved the production costs, but importantly queries the up-to-the-minute data, not data that were hours or days out of date.
Are you saying that the commodity or open source solutions lack the engineering fire power of the Exalead system?
Yes. Even in traditional enterprise search type solutions, I do not see the word “commodity” used by our clients. Let me give you another example. You seem skeptical.
No, I am not skeptical. I saw a demonstration of the new Exalead system in December 2009, and I was impressed with the low latency and the way in which the system delivered answers, not a list of results.
Right. One of our recent new clients has a user base world-wide in excess of a hundred and fifty thousand and uses search over most of this global firm’s content repositories. The firm is now replacing its legacy enterprise search product, Verity K2.
Wow, Verity dates from the mid to late 1980s. I did not know that big name outfits were still using this technology. Can you give me some details?
I can tell you that this Exalead client was previously a flagship implementation for Verity for many years. This client is swapping out Autonomy / Verity for Exalead because the aging search solution was exceptionally hard to manage. In addition, the aging system was expensive to customize. The client’s engineers could not see how to utilize it to meet new and demanding information retrieval requirements moving forward. A final problem was the time required to fiddle with the Autonomy / Verity system to get it to deliver what the users needed. The long development times created staff frustration.
After several months of intense technical evaluations around the World with all the leading search vendors they chose Exalead. I do not think that they would have undertaken this expensive and time consuming exercise if they thought that search was a commodity problem.
I saw a demonstration of Exalead’s indexing method for video. Is that in production now?
Yes. Exalead has made a demonstration available on our Labs’s site at http://voxaleadnews.labs.exalead.com/ .
This solution indexes radio and video news from around the world in several languages. In addition to this, we extract in real-time relevant entities from the news items such as people, organizations and locations.
We offer what I call New Media search solutions, Exalead is demonstrating with customers such as Rightmove in the UK that we are able to provide next generation information management solutions. When I say “next generation” I mean that Exalead delivers advantageous semantic capabilities and operational benefits. Even after doing this, the Exalead solution reduced costs by 80 percent.
There is a revolution going on around search which has led well informed and respected analysts such as Sue Feldman from IDC to state that: “The next generation of information work will be search based.” You know Sue don’t you?
Yes, I have worked with her and also done some work for her at IDC.
In my opinion, the consultants who still state that search is a commodity are out of touch with what is gaining traction in savvy firms. Exalead has had a record year, and our growth in the midst of the economic downturn has been stronger than in previous years.
In your opinion, why are some consultants ignoring the search-based application revolution?
I think this is one of your key points. Many of the people advising enterprises about search lack the hands-on experience to know what the pitfalls are that will create problems for some of the traditional solutions. Let’s face it. Many of the flagship systems date from the mid 1990s. Exalead is a newer code base, and it was engineered to scale, be agile, and be easy to integrate with existing enterprise systems.
Can you expand on this idea? I am not sure we are on the same page?
Sure, we recently attended a business intelligence and data warehouse conference. all the traditional business intelligence vendors were there. Putting search in BI is a very hot topic within organizations at the moment.
In reality organizations want business intelligence solutions that a professional can use with no user training. Users want to be presented with data in a way that makes sense for them. Few want to do huge amounts of design work upfront that second guesses the questions that users want to ask. Traditional BI systems are not agile. As a result, when the business changes, an ever expanding army of programmers is required to re-engineer the solution. The idea is to deploy a system in weeks or months, not months or years. BI systems have to be able to extract structured data from unstructured content in order to perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis. BI systems have to be flexible in order to meet the needs of a user. BI systems have to be able to work with ever growing volumes of data. Stale data is just not acceptable which means the systems must be able to process new data quickly.
How much BI experience have you tallied?
I have worked in business intelligence for many years. What struck me at this conference was how little the messaging of the traditional vendors has changed and more importantly how ill suited they are to meet the above requirements. The limitations that organizations face around business intelligence are driven not by the limitations of the companies vision but more by the limitations of traditional technologies. In a world where it is a challenge for many organizations to meet simple requirements around query and reporting against operational data without huge investments you know that there are major issues with traditional technologies. The ability to meet these and many more requirements is Exalead’s advantage in business intelligence.
What’s your view of this trend that a customer can buy a one size fits all or a very narrow solution from the same vendor?
A customer can buy a one size fits all solution but only if the vendor has a one size fits all product. An appliance is not a one size fits all solution. The appliance becomes a spider in the center of a Web of customized code. An open source search solution is a box of components, a bit like the old Fast Search & Transfer technology. The licensee either assembles the solution or pays a lot of money for engineers to build the solution.
Don’t some vendors let marketing promise the world and then hope the engineers can code what’s just been sold?
Absolutely.
Some vendors have solutions that were designed to be easy to deploy for simple needs but customers hit the wall when they start to expand their requirements or push the product into other areas. Other vendors have more advanced capabilities but they take a huge amount of resources to deploy and lots of difficult customization, often with limited success. These more complex solutions tend not to be widely implemented outside of the core initial requirement.
At Exalead, it is striking how usage of an Exalead-enabled solution jumps. Many traditional information systems seem to turn off large segments of the user population in an organization.
What’s the angle for Exalead?
Our platform is unique in having the same core platform that works on a single laptop for desktop search that scales to millions of users and billions of documents on, for example, our showcase Web search site, by new media companies to provide next generation search based applications, by organizations to provide internal and external search and in ever increasing numbers by organizations to allow them to build agile solutions to retrieve mission critical data from operational databases through to business intelligence, data Warehouses and master data management.
I disagree. How can a single vendor handle the rigors of a foreign language search system with a system that lacks the technical support to deliver on what the marketing folks promise?
One of the frustrating things when I worked for some software vendors was that some prospective clients could not believe whether a capability in the product was reality or just an overblown marketing claim. Some vendors have and still make some unbelievable claims around the capabilities of their products. As people’s knowledge has not been as great around search as say traditional databases or business intelligence solutions, these claims have too often been taken on face value by customers and some analysts.
Why should I believe Exalead?
First, you know me, and you know that I focus on demonstrable evidence of the capabilities of a system.
Second, one of the refreshing things about Exalead is that our marketing is very conservative. Our marketing team never claims something that has not either come from an actual customer’s implementation or been passed directly by our engineers as a capability that the solution can and does deliver. It seems quite obvious but this is not how many marketing departments operate in the industry which has in the past been dominated by “snake-oil” marketing.
This doesn’t of course mean that we promise to deliver less than our competitors. It simply means that we have the proven technology to match our promises.
This is the end of Part 1 of the interview with Mr. Bentinck, Exalead. Part 2 appears on February 5, 2010.
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 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.
Quote to Note: Steve Jobs on Google
February 2, 2010
Short honk: the Wired Epicenter’s story “Google’s Don’t Be Evil Mantra Is Bullsh*t, Adobe Is Lazy; Apple’s Steve Jobs” was fun to read. The alleged quote attributed to Apple honcho Steve Jobs was:
We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullsh*t.”
So “This don’t be evil mantra: It’s BS” is like Beyond Search, whose acronym is also BS. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, February 1, 2010
A freebie. I will report this apple related item and it freeness to the Department of Agriculture, an outfit involved in farming, its outputs, cattle, etc.
Digital River Flows into Search
January 31, 2010
The Seeking Alpha transcript of Digital River’s “analyst call” signaled a shift in enterprise search offerings. Here’s what executives of Digital River (a network services firm that is now an ecommerce, marketing, and online services outfit) said, according to “Digital River, Inc. Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript”:
In 2010, we plan to further drive the adoption and monetization of these new product investments and shift our focus from expanding the breadth of enhancing the products to the depth of our product portfolio. This means continuing to focus on areas where our clients have indicated they have significant interest. Our 2010 plans including going even deeper into remote control by offering an easy to deploy shopping cart and more options for enterprises to speed their time to market. We also intend to expand our merchandising and product management capabilities for our B-to-B offering, enhance our enterprise search and global business intelligence capabilities, make end customer and administrative performance improvements, and introduce more localized payments and currencies to support our expansion into rapidly growing emerging markets.
I find this interesting because companies like Digital River have been commodity providers in my opinion. The shift to complex, value-added solutions such as search and business intelligence is an interesting development. The assumption is that Digital River will have sufficient bandwidth to index an organization’s content, update the index, and deliver results with the same aplomb that Google has condition the 20 somethings to accept as the status quo. The business intelligence angle is interesting as well because that adds another lay of complexity because end users need reports. Canned reports make great demos but they often fail to answer the specific question at hand. The more years a query has to cover, the more crunching and disc access are needed.
My hunch is that the move will be an interesting one to watch, but when it comes to commodity services in the cloud like search and business intelligence, it will be tough to compete with subsidized business models or bundling. In short, the words sound great, but the delivery might be a bit trickier than the MBA wizards on the call understood. And not a peep about the guts of the search technology.
Stephen E Arnold, January 31, 2010
This “hope springs eternal” write up was a freebie. I shall report this sad fact to the SEC, the US government’s hope specialists.
Microsoft Fast Questioned by Ayna
January 27, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to a news story in Ayna. The headline was “Ayna Drops Fast Search Engine.” I have no way of knowing if the write up is balanced, but I want to capture the item so it doesn’t get away from me. According to the write up:
Ayna’s CEO, Adonis El Fakih, remarks “FAST solutions, sales, and support are not in sync with the changing tides or the available search choices out there, and wanted to keep the status quo, instead of stepping up to the plate and deliver a competitive product.” Ayna’s decision to drop FAST from its repertoire of technologies, came after months of deliberation with account managers and support services, which exposed the short comings of the platform and business attitude towards competing in the search space. Mr. El Fakih continued to say “…it is lamentable to loose an important investment in our core services, however we had no choice but to cut our loss and move on.”
Ayna is a search system serving users and customers in the Middle East. Among its services are Web indexing and mapping. You can access the Ayna service in English here. The French version is here. The main site is at http://www.ayna.com/index.ar.html.
Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2010
Tess licked me this morning but I wrote this news item as a way to make a note for myself. I will report this bibliographic intent to the Library of Congress.
Google Teeter Tottering?
January 25, 2010
I don’t want to make a big deal of the Google financial results that produced a decrease in Google’s share price. I don’t want to mention the alleged eclipsing of Google by Facebook in traffic in December 2009. I don’t want to comment on the decision of Messrs. Brin and Page to sell off their shares, effectively giving up their toe lock on Googzilla. I don’t want to point to the dust up between Google and the nation state of China, an outfit with a field work directorate and real weapons, not algorithms. I don’t want to point to the legal hassles in the US with the cranky Viacom. I don’t want to comment on the legal issues in Italy. I don’t want to mention the quite enchanting notion of the French tax authorities dinging Google for some Euros. I don’t want to point out that Google has sprawled across most business services where computer efficiency disrupts existing business models unintentionally. That’s a lot of “don’ts”. If Google were on a teeter totter, the perch seems precarious. What if the kids just jump off?
I want to make three observations.
Last week in Europe (a country with lots of consonants in its name) there was some idle chatter about the backlash that is building against Google. Cheery logo and nifty mouse pads aside, Google is giving some of the folks with whom I spoke nightmares. One recent example is revealed in “German Media Tag-Teaming Against Google ‘Monopoly’”. Read the original for the scoop, but the headline makes the point. Big outfits have to link up to have a shot—note a single shot—at dealing with things Googley.
Second, the abrogation of control makes clear that the Google has morphed beyond the original vision of organizing the world’s information. What has become clear is that non-logical factors are looming ever larger. The abrogation of control is a hint that the “logic” of the original Google may not be enough. The prudent punt I suppose. This decision is important because it means that in a few years, Google will operate like the “old” GM or General Electric, and we know how that model works.
Third, the disruption caused by Google is gaining momentum. A pull out of Google or even the dissolution of Google itself cannot bring back the pre-Google world. I argued this point in The Google Legacy in 2004 (published in 2005). I remember one Harvard grad pointing out that a six year old company doesn’t have a legacy. I pointed out that I may live in Harrod’s Creek, but I did not just fall off the turnip truck. His failure to understand what Google’s technical shaping of the DEC AltaVista insight and the injections of cleverness from research computing would mean. I think that fellow is now a Wal*Mart greeter. Investment banking and blue chip consulting jobs are not what they once were I understand.
Add up these three factors, and we have a road map for what’s ahead in the next three to five years:
- Geo-political actions as a result of technology. Forget cyber warfare. That’s just the visible stuff.
- Massive disruptions of existing business methods and models. The fate of the traditional publishing sector is just the beginning of even more significant dislocations.
- The emergence of those weird distributions where a handful of entities control 90 percent or more of the resources.
Google will remain a player, but it will be further marginalized in some important sectors. To find out which sectors, you will have to wait until I complete my next Google monograph. Exciting stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2010
A freebie. I suppose this is a write up that promotes my new Google study. It won’t be a “Sergey and Larry eat pizza” type monograph. I may even give it away free. I will report this to one of my five publishers if any remain in business by the time I complete the writing.
Autonomy and Precise Team Up
January 24, 2010
Autonomy continues to sniff trends and move before other players in the enterprise search and content processing space. I saw a short announcement on Sharecast (a service with more weird pop ups than most Web sites I visit) that said:
Search software firm Autonomy is teaming up with UK-based media intelligence outfit Precise to develop and market next-generation media intelligence services to the public relations and communications sectors.
Autonomy is well known to readers of this Web log. Precise may not be. Here’s a quick run down on that outfit:
- The company is in the “media intelligence” business. This is somewhat similar to the old style Bacon’s clipping service put on steroids.
- The company has more than 5,000 customers and a big chunk of them are in the financial services and information sector. The idea is that media monitoring provides open source information that Precise converts into intelligence about what a company will or may do. This is the enterprise version of government intelligence agency operations.
- The chief information officer comes from the real time information side of the business. (This suggests to me that Autonomy is deep into the real time content processing spaghetti.)
- The company’s description of its services sounds almost Googley: “Our Media Portal allows our clients to view and evaluate the impact of coverage from every media source – print, broadcast, online. In addition they can access forward planning data at the touch of a button.”
My take on this is that Autonomy will be nosing into other real time information sectors as well. Some of the incumbents may find that Autonomy’s marketing and its corporate clout will push them out of their comfortable positions. Who will be affected by Autonomy if it moves in this direction? That’s a good question.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to write about this tie up. I suppose I shall report this sad fact to MARAD, an outfit that knows about brown water tie ups.
Startling Fact: Size of Cloud Computing Market
January 23, 2010
Tucked into a story about IBM landing Panasonic as a customer for Lotus Notes was a startling fact. “The global cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012, according to IBM based on various market estimates.” You can see this gem in context at “Panasonic Ushers in the Cloud Computing Era with IBM LotusLive”. That’s a heck of a number.
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2010
A freebie. I don’t know what federal agency is in charge of numbers without back up. Maybe OMB?
Who Buys Business Intelligence?
January 22, 2010
In December 2009, I printed out the write up “Business Intelligence (BI) Procurement Survey Results”. I am not into business intelligence, but I am interested in information about the procurement of enterprise software and systems. I read this document on the flight to Detroit earlier this week, and I noted several factoids or semi factoids that struck me as important.
The article appeared in a blog produced by MAIA Intelligence:
a company committed to developing and continually improving powerful Business Intelligence reporting and analysis products to meet the needs of corporate implementations, application service providers and value-added resellers. We serve each of our clients with integrity. No single client is more important than our professional reputation.
I profiled MAIA Intelligence for a client a couple of years ago, and it is clear that the firm has invested some money in its Web site and its information outreach activities. Like most surveys, there is not much data about the size of the sample, the methodology for selecting the sample, margin of error, and the other stuff that annoys first year statistics students.
Nevertheless, here are the items that I circled on my hard copy:
- Marketing, finance, and senior executives are the folks who are the top dogs when it comes to business intelligence. Information technology folks don’t care too much.
- The person who says “yes” or “no” to a business intelligence purchase is usually a C level executive. This horrible convention for referring to top management means that a person who is in charge makes the decision.
- The typical business intelligence purchase takes less than six months. In short, the cost of the sale is going to be high from follow ups, handholding, and the negotiation process
- Those in this sample reported that an in house installation was the preferred approach.
You can review the survey results and pluck your own gems from the write up. I am wondering how long it will take for business intelligence companies to shift their clients to a hosted or cloud based solution. The bottleneck for business intelligence is getting custom queries into the system. With search vendors starting to offer business intelligence solutions, will this trend have a material impact on the business intelligence world. IBM owns a number of business intelligence properties, and there are bunch of small and mid sized firms in the space. The Google has some interesting capabilities in this area as well.
My conclusion is that I am not sure that I know what “business intelligence” means. It is like “enterprise search”: confusing, fragmented, and capable of supporting conflicting claims that a potential buyer has a tough time interpreting.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2010
Okay, another free post. I will report this sad fact to one of the agencies responsible for intelligence. They have a need to know.
Business Intelligence Resources
January 22, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Business Intelligence Resources on the Internet” by Marcus P. Zillman. Mr. Zillman publishes a number of free and for-fee reports. This particular document is available from a direct link in Mr. Zillman’s Web log. I also located a link on Mr. Zillman’s Business Intelligence Resources. If you are a fan of lists of links, you will want to snag this document. I noticed a number of different urls, and a search on the Google provides a large number of hits to Mr. Zillman’s research efforts.
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2010
A freebie. I must report this to the Senate’s library manager. Intelligence is the main focus of the elected officials in this august body.
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