Vivisimo Lands HCPro Deal
July 3, 2009
Vivisimo has a new client. HCPro, a health care regulation and revenue cycle management company, will use the Velocity platform, to power MedicareFind.com. That Web site offers definable search of a comprehensive database of Medicare rules, regulations, and CMS documents governing reimbursement–a critical tool for many companies in the health care business. According to a press release here, “Velocity’s ease of implementation, flexible user interface and social search features were key business drivers in selecting Vivisimo to power MedicareFind.com.” MedicareFind.com is a part of HCPro Inc., a portfolio company of Halyard Investments. Halyard is a private equity firm with more than $600 million of capital under management focused on investing in media, communications, and business services companies. If this is the type of company Vivismo is getting contracts with, they may be an even bigger player in search very soon.
Jessica Bratcher, July 3, 2009
Concept Searching Update
July 3, 2009
Founded in 2002, Concept Searching provides licensees with search, auto-classification, taxonomy management and metadata tagging solutions. You can download a fact sheet about the privately firm here. The software can be used on an individual user’s computer or mounted on servers to deliver enterprise solutions. The company’s secret sauce is its statistical metadata generation and classification method. The technology uses concept extraction and compound term processing to facilitate access to unstructured information. The company operates from Stevenage in Hertsfordshire. A list of the Concept Searching offices is here.
The company emphasizes the value of lateral thinking, and its approach to content analysis implements numerical recipes to find these insights and linkages within unstructured text.
When I updated my profile for this company earlier this year, I noted that the firm had signed Portal Solutions, a company that focuses on things Microsoft. The idea is to make it possible for a user to search for “insider dealing” and retrieve documents where that bound phrase does not appear but a related phrase such as “insider trading” does appear. This type of system appeals to intelligence officers and financial analysts. Concept Searching’s methods generated lists of related topics. You can see an example of the system in action by navigating to this page. I ran several test queries and the interface provided useful information and suggestions about other related content in the processed corpus. A screen shot of the output appears below:
Concept Searching is a Microsoft and Fast Search partner. The idea is that Concept Searching’s technology complements and in some cases extends the search and content processing services in Microsoft products. In May 2009, the company sponsored a best practices site for Microsoft SharePoint. The deal involves a number of companies, including ShemaLogic, KnowlegeLake, and K2 Technologies among others. The site is supposed to go live in the next couple of weeks, but I don’t have a url or a date at this time.
The company had a busy May, signing deals with Allianz Global Investors, Directory, and AT&T Government Solutions.
For me, the most interesting system that Concept Searching offers is its ability to generate and classify terms found in SharePoint documents into a taxonomy. The company has prepared a brief video that demonstrates this functionality. You can find the video here. The company’s approach does not require a separate index. Microsoft Enterprise Search can use the outputs of the Concept Searching system. I noted two “uniques” in the narrative to the video, and I remain skeptical about categorical affirmatives. I think the bound phrase extraction and the close integration with SharePoint are benefits. I just bristle when I hear “unique”, which means the one and only anywhere in the world. Broad assertion in my experience.
Concept Searching’s president, Martin Garland, said here:
Our intellectual property is still unique as we are the only statistical search technology able to indentify multi-word patterns within text and insert these patterns directly into the index at ingestion or creation time. We call this “Compound Term Processing”.
Last week I sat in a briefing given by one of Microsoft’s enterprise search team. I thought I heard descriptions of functions that struck me as quite similar to those performed by Concept Search and such companies as Interse in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I think it will be fruitful to watch what features and functions are baked into the upcoming Microsoft Fast ESP version of the old Fast Search & Transfer system. Remember: the roots of Fast Search stretch deep to 1997, a year before Google poked its nose from the Stanford baby crib.
Partners like Concept Searching have invested significant resources in Microsoft technologies. Will Microsoft respect these investments, or will Microsoft in an effort to recoup is $1.23 billion investment take a hard line toward such companies as Concept Searching.
I am on the fence regarding this issue.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
Sci Tech Publishers: Doom Looms for the Tech Challenged
July 3, 2009
Quite interesting essay by Michael Nielsen: “Is Scientific Publishing about to Be Disrupted?” The answer is soon. I don’t agree. Sci tech publishing is in the midst of a crisis. If you want to know about Mr. Nielsen’s good news interpretation of the coming disruption, dive in.
Mr. Nielsen, in case you haven’t been keeping up with quantum computation, is a real life wizard. He is one of the pioneers of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, he wrote the standard text on quantum computation. This is the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years, and one of the ten most highly cited physics books of all time (Source: Google Scholar, December 2007). He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American. His research contributions include involvement in one of the first quantum teleportation experiments (related), named as one of Science Magazine’s Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998, quantum gate teleportation, quantum process tomography, the fundamental majorization theorem for comparing entangled quantum states, and critical contributions to the formula for the quantum channel capacity.
He explains that publishers are victims of a local optimum; that is, publishers know where they should take their companies. Publishers just can’t bridge the gap. He provides a useful discussion of the knocks traditional media deliver to the digital door to online information.
But the guts of the write up are gathered in his discussion of non traditional publishing of scientific and technical information. The links are useful and the examples are compelling. Let me mention one; the others you can glean directly from his write up. He wrote:
Or consider startups like SciVee (YouTube for scientists), the Public Library of Science, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, vibrant community sites like OpenWetWare and the Alzheimer Research Forum, and dozens more. And then there are companies like Wordpress, Friendfeed, and Wikimedia, that weren’t started with science in mind, but which are increasingly helping scientists communicate their research. This flourishing ecosystem is not too dissimilar from the sudden flourishing of online news services we saw over the period 2000 to 2005.
He concludes his essay with some examples of new opportunities. His recipe for success is that publishers must understand technology in the way Steve Jobs and Messrs Brin and Page do. That’s where he and I part company. A technologist like Mr. Nielsen assumes that a motivated manager can identify, recruit, and manage a world class technologist or somehow edge closer to this capability.
Won’t happen. Technologists like Mr. Nielsen come from a different dimension; sci tech publishers adopt a very different technology world. Nevertheless, the essay is interesting and worth reading.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
Selling Bing: Great Expectorations
July 2, 2009
I was not going to comment on the vomit and porn advertisement for Microsoft. Nasty stuff. I want to point you, gentle reader, to the Register’s “Microsoft Distances Self from IE 8 Puke Ads.” Gavin Clark wrote:
Microsoft told Cnet’s Chris Matyszczyk: “While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it.” The ad was one of four in Microsoft’s Better Browser campaign of spoof 1950s informercials, and the point was to promote IE 8’s private browsing feature.
Impressive creative and remarkable rationalization. However, keep in mind that this is a company that bought a search vendor involved in an ongoing police investigation that has now seeped to the accounting firm validating the Fast Search financials. Par for the course. I wonder if Microsoft Fast works as well as the actress’s faux expectoration? Probably not a question I wish to explore. I think I will run a query on Bing.com for “management judgment.” Isn’t this ad the Dickens?
Stephen Arnold, July 2, 2009
Search and Maxing Out the Grid
July 2, 2009
I recall meetings at Halliburton’s old Nuclear Utilities Services unit we talked about the problem of sucking too much power from the grid. The grid, of course, is a metaphor for a complicated set up of devices and cables that move power from where it is produced to an end point or end points. I found the reference in the Slashdot article “NSA To Build 20-Acre Data Center In Utah” a blast from the past. My thought is that the problem of power sucking data centers is not on most folks’ radar. Along with the deteriorating roads and bridges in rural Kentucky, the power generation industry faces a similar problem. Search requires big data centers. Green yapping aside, as the volume of data increases, the need for megawatts goes up. Green is good but not even zippy chips and clever ideas like uninterruptable power supplied by conventional flashlight batteries is enough. Exciting times and costs ahead for those with big data centers. Plumbing may make the difference between the winners and the losers in search and content processing.
Stephen Arnold, July 2, 2009
SAP: Dinosaurs Resist Extinction
July 2, 2009
Kelly Fishash’s “SAP Hits On Demand SaaS Button to Avoid Extinction” here reminded me that I had in my write up pile a comment about the German software giant’s latest reflex action. Mr. Fishash wrote:
SAP, in a spectacular U-turn, has leapt on board the software-as-a-service bandwagon - the company confirmed its new selling strategy yesterday [June 10, 2009]. The German software giant, which was speaking at an On-Demand conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday, said it will launch SaaS functionality add-ons for its existing Business Suite ERP customers soon. It will wedge open the door to its Large Enterprise on-Demand product, to allow companies to bolt on SAP’s web offerings with their core, on-site or hosted ERP platforms.
I think SAP is one of those companies that merits close observation. The company is a variant of the IBM approach to software and services; that is, big, complex, expensive, and an exemplar of the “take your medicine” method. The SAP TREX search system is interesting, but I don’t see much about it. I track TREX in my Overflight service (sorry, this part of the service is not available for free at this time). I did a write up about TREX in one of the three editions of Enterprise Search Report I wrote. I did not include the system in my 2008 Beyond Search because I just wasn’t hearing much about the company. I continue to follow SAP outfit because it pumped cash into Endeca via its venture unit a year or so ago. I wondered if SAP execs recognized that Endeca required similar upfront consulting for its search and content processing system. The SAP system is front loaded in the same way, and both SAP and Endeca avoid offering bargain basement pricing on enterprise systems.
Now I learn that after a run at raising some fees, SAP is embracing SaaS or Software as a Service which is a more trendy name than timesharing.
Dennis Howlett’s “European SaaS Vendors: Not Quite Comfortabole in Their Skins” here made this point in his June 10, 2009 article:
you have John Wookey’s announcement of SAP’s saas plans. Confused or not, it speaks volumes that SAP chose to make the public announcement to the industry itself. It was greeted with muted acceptance with some muttering that it was defensive while others immediately thought ‘cost.’
I have a slightly different view; specifically:
- SAP is struggling with two financial challenges. The first is the money sucked into the SAP’ black hole of engineering. The company has to spend to keep the quite interesting collection of systems and subsystems working for today’s customers. Second, the company has to find a way to fund research that gets the SAP systems out of the dinosaur trap and into the Googzilla type of low cost engineering mode that Messrs. Brin and Page use. Even Amazon has figured out that open source and commodity hardware are a way to control costs. (Amazon reliability is another issue, however.)
- SAP’s customers are either happy because the system is up and running, business procedures are understood by licensees’ employees, and senior management just pays for engineering support and upgrades. The big invoices are behind the company. Happy days!
- Competitors like Salesforce.com and the Google are not deaf, blind, and mute to the opportunities the IBMs, Microsofts, Oracles, and SAPs create. So, SAP with its juicy client base and “intersting financial challenges” chugs along with a system creaking under complexity, almost immune to substantive change.
I think sudden shifts like the SaaS “love” are little more than signals that an era is ending. I keep watching for similar indicators from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. I wonder which of these three will follow in the footsteps of the SAP dinosaur?
Stephen Arnold, July 2, 2009
Search and an Asteroid Hit
July 1, 2009
I had two separate conversations this week. I can’t reveal the names of the people with whom I spoke or the companies with which the firms were affiliated. I am also going to refrain from identifying the search vendors. In short, this is a toothless post. If you don’t like gums, navigate away.
Debt, Search, and an Name Brand
A financial roll up owns an online service. The service is long in the tooth, expensive to operate, and based on software written when I was still able to see my toes. The conference call made clear that this outfit was going with a name brand search system. The procurement team bought the marketing pitch hook, line, and sinker. The head of the procurement team has an extra dollop of pride on top of a giant scoop of ego. In short, the financial roll up is buying into costs of which it believes it understands. The decision is likely to bankrupt the company. One person asked me, “How can we communicate that this decision will go wrong.” My reply was curt, “You can’t.”
In my experience, there is a certain type of self assured business professional who explains that he or she is good at technology but is really more skilled in business analysis. So the SABP (self assured business professional) assumes that he or she understands the cost issues associated with a large scale search system and simply refuses to listen. I have noticed that a remarkable number of IT professionals have perfected this skill.
The result is a seven figure deal for a name brand vendor and a significant risk of financial collapse for the licensee. Mark my words. The wizards at this outfit will rationalize the problems in dulcet tones. Jobs will be lost. The financial backers will be ruined. Pride and ego get in the way of admitting that more research and analysis have to be supplemented with tests and clear eyed analysis.
Amazing situation. I walked away from this project. When the cost overruns explore, I want to be in Harrod’s Creek and uninvolved.
Free Software and MBAs Who Can Use Google
The estimates of the size of the search sector are pretty miserable. First, most analysts discard Google because at $22 billion, it is easier to explain that it is an ad agency and, therefore, can be tossed out. Yikes. Then, the figures generated by analysts are essential created the way my mother used to back into a parking space at the mall. Trial and error, lots of guestimates, and considerable fretting until the vehicle was inserted at an angle. Close enough for horseshoes, she used to say. So, when a manager responsible for search at a European company spouts numbers, explains that he or she has limited knowledge of technology, and believes that low cost search is the way to search happiness, I clam up.
What’s going on here is that some companies just want to slap in a cheap search system as an component in “more important” software. Now “more important” means worth more than lowly search. As a result, this particular organization and its search boss want to generate revenue. The fact that the search system sucks is irrelevant.
When I brought up the point about meeting user needs, the bright eyed entitlement child said, “We believe that value comes from aggregating components.” Yeah, but if a core component doesn’t work, then what? My question was ignored. I was a person who lived somewhere in Kentucky of all places.
The result is that this outfit is using non functional search and retrieval software, assuming that the suite will make the customers’ problems with information retrieval become irrelevant. Wrong.
Observations
The need for effective information retrieval is going up. Half baked rationalizations, generalization, and just plain baloney will exacerbate financial issues. What concerns me is that these behaviors are flourishing. Search is cruisin’ for a bruisin’, and the pain will be felt by many.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
Beyond Search Story Flow
July 1, 2009
Short honk: The big, addled goose will be in Europe for a week or so. Stories for Beyond Search have been prepared and three or four will run each day. When I get connectivity, I will process breaking news from the goslings. You may notice that some stories seem to refer to events that took place in June. Yep, that’s when we wrote our brand of search, content processing, and information-centric items. We tried to be reasonably timeless and retain the controversial angle we take. Keep in mind we are neither journalists, pundits, mavens, wizards, or azure chip consultants. We are not newly minted experts. Heck, we’re not even experts. This Web log is 100 percent pure marketing. We don’t spam, and we don’t think too much about how many readers it attracts. We conform to our editorial polity stated on our About pages and proudly honk, “Beyond Search, written by addled geese for those with a penchant for recycled information.” Just a beak up, gentle reader. Honk.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
Google and Transit Search
July 1, 2009
In one of my KMWorld columns I reported that New Jersey had embraced Google’s transportation routing system. No one really cared. Now Google, according to Philly.com, has inked a deal with SEPTA. You can get the details by reading “SEPTA to Partner with Google.” What is a vendor of search and ads doing with mass transit routing? Surround and seep dribbles forward. First, the routing, then the search, and finally the ads. What better place to get bus and shuttle timetable information. SEPTA joins New Jersey and Maryland as customers of this Google service.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
WSJ: Now Upgraded to Viagra Class Spammer
July 1, 2009
Short honk: Yep, 7 56 am the Wall Street Journal began spamming me to become a subscriber. Well, the newspaper achieved one objective. I have suspended my Wall Street Journal subscription. I did enjoy this type of information about the proud, oh, so proud New Jersey publication. I wrote. I called customer support. I posted two previous stories about this company’s spamming of existing customers. Now there is one less customer and my legal eagle is writing the consumer complaint entities in the great state of New Jersey and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. One person asked me not to describe newspapers as the “dead tree” crowd. Sorry. When a paying customer gets spammed, not only is the organization a fully fledged dead tree publisher, it has achieved the rank of Viagra class spammer. As an observer, I can be critical. As a customer, I can be miffed. The spammer—Rupert, are you listening?—has lost one real, live, paying customer. How many more will your silly marketing methods drive away. Oh, I know. The Wall Street Journal is too important, too big to fail. Gee, I hear an echo.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
