BPM and Big Data
February 8, 2012
Search and business process management: a shotgun marriage. The two can’t help but come together, as IT Business Edge reports in “Two Examples of BPM’s Role in Data Integration.” Writer Loraine Lawson writes that Talend intends to integrate BonitaSoft’s business process management solution with its Unified Platform.
Lawson is pretty sure Talend is the first data integration specialist vendor to venture into this area. She asked Talend’s VP of marketing, Yves de Montcheuil, how the use of BPM contributes to integration. The write up states:
Data governance. To use a master data hub as a system of record, you’ll need to load it from multiple sources, which will have conflicting data. The MDM and data quality tool will resolve many of these conflicts automatically through matching, but for more complicated conflicts, you’ll need a workflow. BPM can drive this workflow, sending the data to business users who can resolve the conflict by validating the correct data.
That does sound more efficient. Another way Talend expects BPM to help is to manage and automate data integration and data quality services.
Talend provides both open source and SaaS big data solutions to organizations around the world. BonitaSoft also offers both open source and paid solutions, but its realm is business process management. Best wishes to the happy couple!
Cynthia Murrell, February 8, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Wordmap Introduces Taxonomy Connectors
January 30, 2012
According to the Wordmap.com article “Wordmap Taxonomy Connectors for SharePoint and Endeca” , users will be able to use its new Taxonomy Connectors directly with Endeca. Endeca Taxonomy Connector users will have the ability to use Wordmap to handle “all of their daily management tasks.”
A few notable benefits of the Taxonomy connector are,
No configuration needed for consuming systems. It can manage the taxonomy centrally and push out only relevant sections for indexing, navigation and search and taxonomy is seamlessly integrated into the content lifecycle.
The Wordmap Taxonomy platform definitely seems to be a viable tool when it comes to managing Endeca systems and seems like a no brainer for those using the platform. However, a few questions do come to mind. If Open Source connectors enter the scene will there still be a market for Wordmap connectors or what if Oracle decides to become a little stingier with its system access policies?
Users could still find that the Wordmap Taxonomy Connectors hit the spot or they could find the platform too cumbersome and go elsewhere. Guess it depends on “Which way the wind blows.”
We have heard of a push to make open source connectors available. With some firms charging as much as $20,000 for a connector, lower cost options or open source connectors could have a significant impact on the content processing sector.
April Holmes, Janaury 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SAP: Lemons from Lemonade for Search Vendors
January 18, 2012
A couple of years ago I did a series of columns about SAP, the German software company which is imbued with the DNA of IBM and the more unpredictable genes of the “let ‘er rip” approach to generating revenues. Change is difficult, and SAP interests to me because the firm’s machinations are the embodiment of the dislocations that old style software vendors face in the cloudy world of Amazon, Google, and even old Big Blue herself, IBM. Keep in mind, one of SAP’s strategic moves was to purchase Sybase.
HANA emerged two years ago as a solution to the woes of organizations struggling with big data, the need to make sense of them, and the complexity which threatens to sink traditional enterprise applications. Consider SAP itself. The company owns Business Objects, once the leader in business analytics. Today I don’t think of Business Objects, which may say more about my awareness than SAP’s marketing. But I hear zero about Inxight Software which performs entity extraction and other text operations and I have heard little or nothing about TREX, SAP’s information retrieval system. I lost track of the SAP investment in Endeca long before SAP’s rival Oracle snagged the 1998 technology to “enhance” its own struggling search solutions.
What is HANA?
According to an SAP friendly blog, SAP describes HANA in this way:
HANA is the foundation and the core of all that we do now and going forward for existing products, new products and entirely new frontiers. We are transforming enterprise software with HANA, and we are transforming our entire product portfolio,” Sikka said in a statement earlier this week announcing that SAP HANA is now generally available worldwide. “But HANA is more than a product,” Sikka continued. “It is a new paradigm, an entirely new way to build applications. It is the basis for our own intellectual renewal internally at SAP—where we rethink how we design, build, deploy, service and sell products—and the basis for our customers’ and partners’ intellectual renewal—where we help customers rethink existing business problems and help them solve entirely new challenges using design-thinking.” (Source: The Top 10 Reasons SAP HANA Is Disrupting Larry Ellison’s Grand Plans]
To me, HANA is a next generation database and it now has to differentiate itself from the XML next generation database from the likes of MarkLogic, from Cloudera, from other NoSQL solutions, and from the new and improved versions of data management systems from IBM, Microsoft, and even Amazon. Big job. Maybe an impossible job?
In December 2011, I snipped the write up “Can SAP be the #2 database vendor by 2015?” I found this passage particularly interesting:
Why doesn’t SAP HANA have deeper market penetration? Put simply it is because SAP wanted it this way. Whilst HANA truly is a general-purpose database, SAP first announced it as an analytics appliance for the 1.0 release. They also priced it really high and didn’t’ offer a discount – list pricing can be as high as €180,000 for a 64GB HANA “unit”, depending on which version you require. And what’s more, SAP sells solutions and HANA is a platform, so the global sales force doesn’t quite know how to sell it in volume – yet. They didn’t want to sell it in volume in any case because they wanted to introduce it slowly to market – building stability, references along the way and avoiding expensive and embarrassing global escalations. So by the end of 2011 we should expect $100-150m of HANA sales, which is 3-5% of SAP’s total revenue. Not particularly significant, right? Well in September they released HANA as being supported for SAP’s Business Warehouse software, which allows large-scale data warehouses. And this is where it gets interesting: there are 17,000 existing BW customers, and HANA would provide business benefit to all of them.
If you are interested in HANA, you can access SAP’s primer about the solution at this link.
In the midst of the HANA hype, Seeking Alpha’s “SAP Is No Longer The Leader It Once Was” stated in December 2011:
The current most promising innovation is SAP HANA, an appliance with columnar in-memory technology enabling fast processing and near real-time analytics. According to SAP, HANA has the potential to become the next-generation system architecture, removing the use of middleware and relational databases. However, the root causes of the downturn appear outside the perimeter of the company transformations: product development, continuous customer complaints, and the 20-year aging ERP that represents the core of the customer base seem to remain unchanged. Agile is probably not enough to address the long-term issues of product development. Most likely, Agile is not the solution to fifteen years of trying to get CRM right, or to making three platform mistakes in three on-demand initiatives (CRM on-demand in 2006, Business byDesign in 2007, and SaaS Enterprise in 2009).
The Seeking Alpha analysis then makes these machine gun like statements:
Is SAP getting it right? Here is a summary of the points to keep in mind to answer this question:
SAP R&D has yet to deliver its first truly successful product since 1992 (it could be HANA overtime)
The core of ERP that holds the customer base is outdated
There seem to be no plans to develop a modern replacement product
Development of a potential new ERP would take years
Sales have declined stepping back by 3 to 4.5 years
SAP’s leadership is questionable
According to Gartner, the revenue from relicensing R/3 to ERP 6.0 is ending
Customers and employees have lost trust
Executives have been leaving
On-demand is not making progress
The customer base is increasingly at risk
Analysts estimate that HANA could produce just 10% of the revenue by 2013.
There is a gap between the buzz and the hard facts.
What does this mean for vendors who hitch their wagons to the SAP “star” as ISYS Search Software did with the announcement “ISYS Wins Software Deal with SAP”? Three points:
- Search vendors are looking at their technology and packaging it in ways to generate incremental revenue. ISYS, it appears, is in the connector game, competing with firms such as EntropySoft
- SAP seems to be lagging further and further behind the NoSQL players who are now facing headwinds despite early market leads. My example is MarkLogic, the XML database outfit
- The broader market seems to be splitting into quite different segments. SAP is going to have difficulty in the IBM and Oracle space, and it is going to have trouble with the open source NoSQL crowd which seems to prefer having Hadoop on its T shirts than HANA.
SAP remains interesting, but it is now in some danger of further marginalization. SAP needs a search system still.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Kapow Releases Katalyst Version 8.2
January 2, 2012
Kapow Software moves in a new direction that is a bit of a surprise to us. EWeek reports, “Kapow Software Punches Out Update of Cloud-Based Analytics Service.” Kapow is positioning its Katalyst version 8.2 as a self-service, subscription model analytics tool with an intuitive user interface. It also boasts 100% data accuracy. According to the write up:
Katalyst 8.2 can organize, integrate and analyze data from streams as diverse as legacy, on-premise, social media, partner, B2B, competitor, e-commerce, blogs and news sites, as well as location-based and mobile data, [founder Stefan] Andreasen said. The Kapow service is one that speaks to both IT and line-of-business people at an enterprise, and thus can bring them together (when they most often work separately) to solve common research needs.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, Kapow Software has offered innovative technology solutions for a decade. The company prides itself on bridging the divide between IT departments and business users. It now has over 500 customers worldwide but its heart remains in Copenhagen. Take your conceptual umbrella we suggest.
Cynthia Murrell, January 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Talend Pitches Holistic Integration
December 21, 2011
Connectors get some new lingo; holistic integration is a term we learned from Talend’s press release, “Talend V5: Democratizing Holistic Integration.” The company defends its coinage of the term:
Frankly, IT often uses loosely some terms from the general corpus. But in this case, holistic does the trick. . . . The promise of Talend v5 is to enable IT organizations to converge traditionally disparate integration efforts and practices through a common set of products, tools and best practices. When an organization deploys Talend v5, it will deploy essentially one platform, regardless of the integration need: data integration, application integration, process integration.
That does fit the definition of the term, but it is a little grand, don’t you think? Hmm, maybe not in a field titled “Big Data.”
Talend positions this release as the result of the changes its products have undergone since it bought the German Sopera this time last year. The company is quick to point out that this comprehensive approach does not result in bloatware. Each product included in the platform works independently; customers must only deploy the parts they need.
The write up emphasizes that Talend’s products are still based on the open source underpinnings on which they were founded. The company boasts of being a leader in the open source data management market.
Cynthia Murrell, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Trade Tips and Prices at the SharePoint StackExchange
December 16, 2011
“We accept questions about the SharePoint platform. This is defined as the functionality within:· the SharePoint server range of products (i.e. SharePoint Foundation and Server, Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server)· SharePoint Designer· InfoPath where it integrates with SharePointWe also accept questions about community-owned, open source products based on the platform. We don’t accept questions about commercial products that integrate with, run on top of, or extend the platform. Questions can come from a variety of different roles… developers, admins and end-users are all welcome to ask questions here!”
Exclusive Interview: Gilles Andre, PolySpot
December 13, 2011
Last week I was able to interview Gilles Andre, the chief executive officer, of PolySpot late in November and then last week. Mr. Andre joined PolySpot in June 2010. Prior to this, Gilles was co-founder and CEO of Augure, a company engaged in e-reputation management and services. Mr. Andre was also the founder of Leonard’s Logic suite in 1997 (software editor of Genio ETL). Acquired by Hummingbird in 1999. Mr. Andre is board member at Talend, recognized market leader in open source middleware solutions.
PolySpot is a provider of open search solutions. The company offers a robust and innovative architecture which supports search-centric applications accessible from any device connected to a client’s network.
I was interested in Mr. Andre’s view of PolySpot. The search and content processing sector is in transition, and the role of open source solutions continues to gain traction. He told me:
PolySpot’s agile framework, its use of open source technology like Lucene, and a focus on putting information in the business work flow. Olivier Lefassy, David Fischer – our CTO – and I had designed some interesting ideas, and I was eager to fine tune these elements into a business model that would propel PolySpot over the hurdles which cause many enterprise information solutions to fail.
With open source making in roads at IBM and other major technology providers, I asked about Mr. Andre’s involvement in the “communities” which play an important role in the sector. He told me:
When I was board member at Talend, a very successful French initiative in the ETL [extract, transform, load] segment from inception in 2006 to December 2010, I came to understand the potential of open source software. PolySpot gives me a chance to leverage my knowledge about fast growth, high potential companies, open source software, and the “big data” opportunity around us. I think you can say that data management and information are woven throughout my business fabric.
The PolySpot approach boasts a robust framework. I asked what PolySpot has constructed around Lucene, the open source search system:
We build the connectors I mentioned before and a connector software development kit. We engineered out proprietary transformation and enrichment platform (that’s the Sense Builder components) which adds intelligence to raw information. We also developed a very innovative end to end administration console enabling to design and maintain search applications with no particular technical skill, this eases Lucene and Solr configuration but also amplifies the search functionalities provided by Solr. Last, we have added display modules, information views, and graphical user interfaces. These can easily be customized. To make it brief, PolySpot delivers the first end-to-end packaged search infrastructure over Lucene and SOLR core technologies.
After seeing several demonstrations of client deployments, I was impressed with the PolySpot technology. To learn more about PolySpot’s solutions and technical approach, navigate to www.polyspot.com. The full text of the interview with Mr. Andre is located in the ArnoldIT’s series Search Wizards Speak at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, December 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Customer Experience to Take Center Stage in 2012
December 2, 2011
We are post-Thanksgiving—that time of year when the “year in review” articles start emerging and predictions are made for coming trends to meet us in the new year. The world of content management systems is no exception. Marisa Peacock gives us some of her predictions in, “If 2012 Is the Year of Customer Experience, What Will it Bring?”
According to Peacock, customer experience will take center stage in areas such as mobile, social, personalization, and localization to name a few. What does all this mean to us? A need for better content management.
Peacock’s advice:
“Of course, we must wait for 2012 to really understand how and if brands will leverage the customer experience. With only a month left before the new year, companies of all sizes are strongly encouraged to revisit their mobile strategies, customer relationship management tools and social media policies.”
How do you prepare in a smart way, despite what changes the new year may bring? Invest in a smart content management solution, one that can handle information needs on multiple levels. We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze and its suite of offerings.
“Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise understands you, or to be more precise, understands what the most important information is for you at any precise moment in time. It is the center of excellence for your knowledge and simultaneously your personal assistant for all questions. The information pairing technology brings enterprise and Cloud data together.”
Mindbreeze can handle mobile, email, enterprise, website search, etc. Their Connectors feature works with SharePoint 2010, if that system is already in place at your organization. Regardless of the size or scope of your organization, information needs continue to grow exponentially. Heed the warnings and manage your information in a way that improves the customer experience. Find a smart solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze and you will be able to adapt to changing needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 02, 2011
Sponsored by: Pandia.com
Content Management Best Practices
November 25, 2011
With the raging demand for content management systems, not all organizations know how to correctly implement such systems, such as the ubiquitous SharePoint. Specifically with SharePoint, an organization can’t just open the box and expect their content to be organized and retrievable. Patrick Sledz lays out some best practices when working with content in SharePoint in his blog entry, “5 Best Practices for Working with Documents and SharePoint.” In addition to advice about file naming, Sledz also addresses using SharePoint as a platform and not just a filing system.
“Use SharePoint as a Document Management Platform. And I mean Platform, not just a secondary file storage location. The file stored here is the ‘one version of the truth.’ This is your starting and ending point. DO NOT send this document to people, but send links to the document. This way you’ll keep just 1 version of the truth.”
Adding to the theme of organization and storage, Sledz recommends adding metadata. While the advice is good for SharePoint users, we have found third party solutions that offer intuitive applications incorporating these principles. Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers a suite of solutions that when combined provide for every aspect of an organization’s information storage and retrieval needs. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise offers its own enterprise solution, or Fabasoft Mindbreeze Connector syncs up with an organization’s current SharePoint applications, increasing usability and retrieval.
“The Microsoft SharePoint Connector connects the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and enables the search for documents stored in that application.”
Metadata is innate and intuitive with a solution like Mindbreeze. So while the above best practices are a good reminder for any organization using enterprise solutions, a smart enterprise solution will provide more answers and leave your organization with less questions. Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze to see if their products can save you time and trouble.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 25, 2011
Sponsored by: Pandia.com
ISYS Has 16,000 Customers. Did I Goof?
November 11, 2011
I covered six vendors of enterprise search systems in my June 2011 The New Landscape of Enterprise Search. An azure chip consulting firm borrowed a key word from my monograph’s title and put out a report covering twice as many vendors.
Today I read “16,000 Organizations Worldwide Now Boost Their Productivity with the ISYS 1-Click FileFinder.” In a write up about AtomicPR’s spam attack on me and the MarkLogic “reinvention of itself as more than a file markup and repository outfit,” I mentioned ISYS Search Software was licensing its connectors, essentially software widgets that allow one system to ingest the files from an incompatible system. So ISYS, ISYS, ISYS.
Years ago I met the founder of ISYS Search Software in Crow’s Nest in a suburb Sydney, Australia. I recall a very interesting lunch in a restaurant that was almost next to the ISYS headquarters. Very interesting those Australian engineers. At the time, I was doing something for some outfit sponsoring the international chief of police conference or some similar intelligence-type event. I was one of the speakers and a guest of the Australian government. In my spare time, I was either watching folks shoot red kangaroos or visiting search and information retrieval experts. After the visit, I did some work for Ian Davies, the founder. His role has changed, and I have lost track of him, his senior sales professional, and the senior engineer whom I met that day. Distance and time I suppose.
I have drifted away from ISYS because I learned that the company–despite a new president, new lines of business like licensing connectors, and introducing file finding utilities—was not hitting my radar with the sort of information I am now tracking. No problem, of course. Quite a few search vendors have changed their spots or at least their marketing pitch faster than a rap star who signs a movie deal. Examples range from Coveo becoming a customer support solution provider to Vivisimo’s puzzling “information optimization.” Other vendors have gone quiet like Dieselpoint, an XML centric search system vendor. Others have found themselves on the receiving end of a dump truck filled with cash. Think InQuira, Autonomy, Endeca, and RightNow to name four vendors who are now happily within giant corporate shells thinking about which island to buy.
My understanding is that ISYS generates about one third of its revenue from the US and the balance from elsewhere. Although the UK is a good market for ISYS, the company’s stronghold is Australia. This raises what I call “the Canadian question.” Ah, you ask, “What’s Canada got to do with Australia and ISYS?”
Here’s my point. When determining how much revenue one of my ventures can generate in Canada, I take the US revenue and then figure that Canada will product 10 percent of that amount. The reason has to do with population, appetite for the sort of products my team produces, and experience. The 10 percent can be five percent, or it could be 15 percent. However, 10 percent is a good rule of thumb.
Therefore, if a company in Australia generates $10 million a year in that country of 23 million people, then it follows that the US with its population of 308 million should produce revenue of about 12 to 13 times the Australian revenue. If we assume that ISYS is generating $10 million from the land down under, I would expect $120 million from the land up above.
I may be off base, but in our research for The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, I did not find data to support that ISYS was generating revenue in this range. Therefore, I decided to exclude the company from my monograph.
The azure chip consulting firm replete with home economics majors, a handful of former journalists, and a couple of failed webmasters sees the world differently. I think the reason is that the azure chip outfit uses its reports as sales collateral. I don’t have any first hand experience with the “real” consultants in enterprise search, but after reading some of these reports, I formed my own opinion. Yours may differ.
To answer the question, “Did I goof by not including ISYS along side Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, Google, Microsoft, and Vivisimo?,” The answer is, “I don’t think so.”
Hoping a vendor is competing with the likes of Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, etc. is one thing. Actually beating these firms in major accounts is a different one. Just my opinion, and I look forward to the push back from the “experts” who know more than I, aggrieved company executives who want me to revisit my conclusions about which companies are altering the landscape of search, and the “real” consultants who will swarm over my view point.
Have at it kids. Sales revenues matter. When someone plops down $1.2 billion as Microsoft did for the Fast Search & Technology system or the interesting $10 billion for Autonomy, I will make another pass over the “big six.” Until then, I need to hear first hand about how non US firms cope with my Canadian rule of thumb. I quite like the ISYS technology. But for Landscape, revenues play more of a role than technology.
Stephen E Arnold, November 11, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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