Autonomy Tasers Its Competition
July 2, 2010
I can hear the yelps now, “Don’t tase me, man. No, not again.” Bzzzap. “Yow.”
Now I hear a gasping, “Autonomy cannot be Number One. We are Number One.”
Who is doing the complaining? Probably about 300 vendors of search and content processing systems that is who. Why the howls on this fine summer day?
Navigate to Chron.com and read “Autonomy Is #1 in Search and Discovery Market, According to Leading Market Research Firm.” There is a write up about IDC’s study “Worldwide Search and Discovery 2009 Vendor Shares: An Update on Market Trends.” So, the 300 yelpers have to do more than howl, issue one shot news releases, or drop the ball on marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. Autonomy — acording to a big gun analyst outfit — is the top dog, the king of the hill, and the cat’s pajamas in search and content processing. This is not my opinion, gentle reader, I am pointing you to a rock solid source, IDC.
What’s the write up say? Here’s a snippet:
Autonomy continues to be the largest enterprise supplier, using its search-based IDOL infrastructure to act as a foundation for content-centric and search-driven business applications including eDiscovery and compliance, Web content management, enterprise content management and rich media, search marketing, intelligence, call center and customer support, and traditional knowledge management applications.” “Businesses from every industry continue to turn to Autonomy to help them achieve what other technology companies fail to deliver on – identifying the meaning within all forms of information, in real-time, in order to protect and promote their organization,” said Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. “Autonomy’s unique meaning-based approach to information computing is what continues to fuel our rapid growth and clear market leadership, as validated by the recent IDC report on Search and Discovery market shares.”
And no big disagreement from the addled goose. I quite like some of the Autonomy technology. I like most of what IDC produces. If the data compiled for the report are accurate, Autonomy has a big footprint and happy customers. Among the thousands of Autonomy licensees are AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler AG, Deutsche Bank, DLA Piper, Ericsson, FedEx, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyds TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, Tesco, T-Mobile, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
You may be using Autonomy technology and not even know it. More than 400 companies glue Autonomy to their own systems in order to provide search and content processing functions. Recognize any of these names? Symantec, Citrix, HP, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO.
When the competition is able to stop yammering, perhaps some of these 300 vendors will start selling, marketing, and making Autonomy perspire. Google? Microsoft? Are you paying attention. Autonomy has more than 20,000 customers for its search and content processing systems, applications, and services. Oh, keep in mind that IDC offers data to back up its conclusion that Autonomy is Number One.
Competitors who make Kin phones and then kill their Kin the next day may want to reexamine their strategy. Other vendors may want to stop trying to tell governments how to run their railroads and business licensing policies.
Autonomy seems to have more – ah, how shall I say it? – yes, focus.
By the way, how does that taser feel? Want another zap? Bzzzap.
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2010
Freebie
EMC Beefs Up Its Content Processing
June 27, 2010
Data collection agency EMC, http://www.emc.com, has moved to build a platform for expanding business in the future, thanks to a recent partnership inked with low-profile legal discovery company Applied Discovery. Rumor has it that EMC learned about search via a marriage and divorce with the Fast Search & Transfer technology. The most recent move is to create a comprehensive service by blending SourceOne eDiscovery-Kazeon with the case discovery review power of Applied Discovery’s process and review engine. EMC started out as large storage vendor, and they bought Kazeon.Will the result be a complete solution for indexing and searching large data stores? EMC hopes this is the findability fix.
Patrick Roland, June 27, 2010
Freebie
Search Vendors Try New Sales Hooks
June 25, 2010
Forget the surveys that companies run to make clear the problems in information access. Anyone who looks for information today knows that pinpointing information to answer a business question is not exactly bulletproof. Recommind, once a vendor anchored in the legal market, stretched its wings into the enterprise. My recollection is that some of the company’s technology reminded me of Autonomy’s original approach. Now Recommind seems to be pushing into a different space, one that combines indexing, risk management, some MBA speak, and a dash of legal lingo. Navigate to “Disconnect Between Legal and IT Getting Worse, Recommind Survey Reveals.”
In my experience, information technology organizations are definitely disconnected from most of the corporate functions. I don’t think IT is at fault. IT departments are trying to protect themselves from what I call “requests from the clueless.” I know business managers are under pressure. CFOs are wild eyed in their efforts to cut costs and maximize returns. The top executives are scrambling to find ways to buy their private island, get a new BMW, and create a life without BP scale risks, bloggers, and 20somethings who want to make their bones on the corpses of today’s market leaders. Many managers see a demo or chat with pals at the country club and come to the office on Monday with requests that are essentially impossible for an IT department to meet with available resources.
What’s the Recommind survey purport to tell me? IT and legal eagles are operating on different wave lengths. I need a survey to tell me this. I don’t even operate on the same wave length as my two attorneys and I pay these guys to try and help me. For me, here’s a quote that reveals more about client management and vendors than about IT departments:
At a time when e-Discovery and regulatory issues are gaining momentum, these results don’t exactly instill confidence across the enterprise.
Here’s my view of the situation:
- Certain vendors of search technology have to find a way to make sales to keep the money pipe full. The options are market like the devil or go to Satans’ spawn and get more funding. Which path would you take? I vote for marketing. I think these types of surveys are marketing efforts and when the results are released, I know the data are viewed by the survey sponsor as a way to generate sales leads.
- Obviously plain vanilla search is not a hot ticket. I think I was one of the first people to explain that search was dead in my Searcher article for Barbara Quint four or five years ago. No search vendor is going to bridge the gap between IT and the many over stressed units in an organization. Successful vendors find ways to solve problems, not tackle the management tensions that are human centric organizational issues.
- The new lingo does not convince me that content processing software can address deeper issues with management and governance.
You may have a different view, so read the survey results. Many search vendors have marketed themselves into a corner. Now organizations have to find solutions to information access problems. I don’t think there is much margin for error. Sure, some assert the economy is improving. That’s wonderful. But the glory days of search marketing are behind us, and I think more than catch phrases, house surveys, sponsored white papers, and fawning azure chip consultants will be needed.
Here’s my checklist for starters:
- Demonstrations that solve a problem
- Clear statements of what a findability-centric software system can and cannot do
- Avoidance of MBA crazy talk, jargon, unsupported assertions, and faux case analyses
- Partnerships that give a prospect confidence that the system can be made to work at a reasonable cost in a reasonable period of time
- Focus on solutions. Search and content processing vendors are not blue chip management consultants, never will be and probably cannot afford the ministrations of Bain, Booz, Boston Consulting, or McKinsey and, therefore, have little first hand information of what is required to tackle management challenges in an organizations.
Many search vendors are scrambling for a new sales hook. What approach will work? No clue have I.
Stephen E Arnold, June 25, 2010
Freebie
Vendors Offering Free eDiscovery Services Called Out
June 21, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Kroll Ontrack and Iron Mountain Stratify Demonstrate That “Free” Is Usually NOT The Cheapest Solution For Electronic Discovery.” In the pre Prohibition era, saloons would offer a free lunch. The idea was to get folks in the door and sell them unbranded whiskey and other delights. The 21st century version involves software if I understand the write up. The free service may not be free. For me the key passage was:
It’s “buyer beware.
The case examples are interesting. One involves Kroll which until recently was a unit of an insurance and financial services firm. The other references Iron Mountain, a company with roots in document storage. To add color to the write up, a chart shows how costs for a 100 gigabyte eDiscovery project unfold.
Is this analysis definitive? No. Is it suggestive? Yes.
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2010
Freebie
Data Plutonium Government Style
June 7, 2010
You have to admire European regulators. Read “MEPs Want Google to Keep Customer Data for Longer.” Keeping data can be pretty darned exciting. Data may not be the Plutonium that is good to go for 76 million years (Atomic Number 94. Atomic Mass Number 244). Digital data may be more like Plutonium that is exciting for about 86 years (Atomic Number 94, Atomic Mass Number 238). In my opinion, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
“In reality… the substance of the declaration is to call on the Commission to extend the data retention directive to search engines, so that all searches done on, for example, Google will be monitored.”
Treasure troves of data are wondrous. Many exciting factoids emerge from these collections. Just like a gram of that fun stuff Plutonium in your pants pocket.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2010
Freebie
UK Lags US in eDiscovery
May 9, 2010
Here’s my view from the mine run off pond: When products and services don’t sell, companies with alleged grievances can turn to litigation. The idea is that a court may produce some cash in tough times. Governments get in the game as well. Pile on some regulations and then cut the weak ones from the herd. There may be some revenues to squeeze from regulated outfits who get confused or stumble over the big letters of the law.
I read “Recommind Research Shows UK Companies Not Ready for e-Disclosure”. The key passage in the write up for me was:
As it happens, Simon Price was here in Oxford last Friday, showing me predictive coding in Recommind’s e-Disclosure product Axcelerate eDiscovery. I do not spend much time actually looking at applications, but the rate at which they advance on the problems means that even I am in danger of losing touch with what they are capable of doing. Who, you wonder, would court the risk and expense which appears from those recent judgments when applications like this exist to mitigate the risk? The answer appearing from Recommind’s survey is that most corporations of more than 1,000 employees court that risk.
Will Recommind’s data motivate UK organizations to hop on the eDiscovery bandwagon? I know that losing and paying are useful cattle prods. Are the data valid? I will leave that to you.
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2010
Unsponsored post.
International eDiscovery
May 7, 2010
Short honk: Two outfits–Lineal Ltd in the UK and Complete Discovery Source in the US–have teamed to delivery global eDiscovery services. The US is one of the most litigious and legal eagle stuffed nations. Now eDiscovery is being exported just like motion pictures, rap, and Baywatch. The basics of the deal appear in “Lineal Partners with Complete Discovery Source to Provide International eDiscovery Services.” Is this a step forward or another example of a cultural export? Of the dozen vendors of eDiscovery, aren’t most selling internationally? Many are.
Legal eagles like to bill. For these professionals, international eDiscovery is good news. For others? The answer depends on who wins.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2010
Unsponsored post.
Cognition Technologies Added to Overflight
April 6, 2010
We received a clipping about Cognition Technologies’ beefing up its management team.
Stephen J. Lief will assume responsibility for Cognition’s legal eDiscovery business. According the the Cognition announcement of dBusinessNews, “His role is to expand the company’s growth by developing partnerships with eDiscovery vendors, law firms and enterprise legal departments.” One interesting aspect of his background is that he has served as the founding editor of a number of publications, including the Legal Tech Newsletter.
Cognition develops semantic / natural language processing technology. The company describes itself this way:
Cognition’s Semantic NLP, the Company’s patented linguistic meaning-based text processing technology, is able to simultaneously deliver significantly higher levels of precision and recall than is possible with currently used NLP and Search technologies….Unlike all of the popular text reading and search in use today which utilize mathematically-based pattern-matching technology (i.e. they search for a particular word pattern based upon the user query), Cognition’s Semantic NLP understands the meaning within the context of the text it is processing. Therefore, the end benefit delivered to Cognition’s clients is simultaneously more precise and relevant understanding of their customers’ actions and intent.
Here at the goose pond, there has been an uptick in questions about semantic search. We have added Cognition to our Overflight service.
Stephen E Arnold, April 6, 2010
This is a freebie.
Recommind and Predictive Coding
March 2, 2010
I received a flood of “news” from vendors chasing the legal market. Now law firms have fallen on hard times. One quip making the rounds in Kentucky is that a law degree is as valuable as a degree in Harry Potter studies from Frostburg State. I did not know one could get a degree in Harry Potter, so this may be some cheap jibe at the expense of attorneys.
The real action for legal licensing is in the enterprise. In the lousy financial climate, its seems that lawyering should be done in doors and back at the ranch. The demand for software and services that can chop discovery down to a management hunk of work have been selling. I prepared a legal market briefing for a couple of clients last year, and I was surprised at how much churn was underway in the segment. Even storage vendor Seagate poked its nose into the eDiscovery market.
I was delighted to receive a file from a reader that had the title “An Interview with Craig Carpenter of Recommind: A Discussion on Predictive Coding.” My recollection was that Recommind’s Mr. Carpenter, a polymath and attorney, was working on Recommind marketing. He is also a vice president of Recommind and teaches at the University of San Francisco. His focus in his class work is high technology marketing, content management, and digital rights management. Heady stuff.
You can get a copy of this document from JD Supra, whose tag line is “Give Content. Get Noticed.” I had not heard of this service previously.
Several points in the interview struck me as interesting. Let me highlight these and offer some of the ideas flapping around my goose brain.
First, Recommind won an award as the best product in the Knowledge Management Systems category. I think that is a good marketing angle, but I do not know what “knowledge management” means. Mr. Carpenter explained Recommind’s “knowledge management” product this way:
MindServer Search is our flagship enterprise search product. It provides highly accurate and relevant search results through a simple, intuitive interface. It uses proprietary, machine learning technology to automatically create concept models based on the information within the enterprise. That gives it the unique ability to accurately identify and rank relevant information for each user without the need for additional input from the user. For our legal customers, we also offer a popular Matters and Expertise module for MindServer Search, which enables them to find all relevant matter information and expertise within the firm. The module’s Expertise Location feature automatically updates areas of expertise based on work product, projects, clients, etc., which makes it simple to find attorneys with relevant experience on a particular topic, as well as the documents and matters associated with them.
Well and good, but I think this is search, retrieval, and social graph functions. That means that I understand Recommind’s definition of “knowledge management.”
Second, Recommind offers a description of its “knowledge management” system. The elements are CORE (context optimized relevance engine), which I believe is a probability based method somewhat akin to Autonomy’s approach. But the interesting statement, in my opinion, was:
There’s no doubt Predictive Coding is accurate enough – this has been proven in many cases. A number of AmLaw 30 firms have proven it by using Predictive Coding and comparing it to the results from contract attorney review (and partner review as well) on the same data. The results in every case were that they achieved better accuracy with Predictive Coding, and in the process saved 50-80% of what they would have spent on traditional review because contract attorneys were either not needed or were able to work far more efficiently (or both). This is what we mean when we talk about revolutionizing the economics of eDiscovery; no one else is doing this.
Third, this system’s automated methods can be used in legal matters. I found this statement interesting:
Judges care about getting to a just result as efficiently as possible; they care far less about the means used to get to that result – so long as the means do not undermine the pursuit of justice. So judges are not in the business of ?validating? any particular technology or process. That said, given the broken economics of today’s eDiscovery judges have definitely been expressing a fervent desire for a better approach to document review, and prominent judges like Judge Facciola, Grimm and Peck have indicated that technology can and should be brought to bear on the problem, because it can really help. It’s important to look at how the top litigation firms have responded now that they have a mandate from judges to change the economics of eDiscovery. And if you look at the top firms in the world — WilmerHale, Morgan Lewis and Fulbright & Jaworski, just to name three — they have made a commitment to Predictive Coding as the future. That’s a very, very strong endorsement.
Endorsements are good marketing, but in my limited experience with the legal system, what’s okay and what’s not okay can be variable.
Fourth, the role of humans remains important. I found this statement interesting:
There will always be a need for human review in eDiscovery. But bear in mind that the traditional eDiscovery process relies on an outdated, paper-based model that requires attorneys to sit in a room and review terabytes of ESI, one at a time. That’s a textbook example of work that should be assisted by intelligent automation. With the continuing rise of eDiscovery, there will always be plenty of work for attorneys. Some firms, and some clients, will always want to have an attorney’s eye on every document – which does not at all preclude the use of Predictive Coding. Even in such a case, they can perform that task much faster and more consistently using Predictive Coding.
Fifth, this comment about the cost of the system was instructive. This is the relevant passage:
We have certainly added more choices to our price list to accommodate the overwhelming demand we’ve seen, but if you are asking if we have had to lower our prices the answer is not at all. It’s definitely the case that much of the eDiscovery process, including culling, processing, hosting and forensic imaging, has been commoditized; older vendors trying to maintain market share and the rather simplistic appliance offerings and vendors have pushed this trend. But where we play and what our products are capable of doing for clients – Predictive Coding being perhaps the best example – is nowhere near becoming commoditized. The basic problem with eDiscovery is that it still uses the paper-based, linear review model, even though 99% of information these days is digital. Most EDD products try to alleviate the symptoms of that problem rather than address the problem itself, e.g. ?better linear review, a simple culling appliance, etc. Those technologies are commoditized now or will soon be. But we attack the fundamental problems of eDiscovery, the illness rather than its symptoms. Predictive Coding doesn’t just streamline document review for human reviewers-though it delivers that too-it actually automates the majority of the process using intelligent technology and defensible workflow. That’s something no other company or technology can deliver – period. And because it truly is game-changing technology, law firms and clients alike are more than willing to pay a premium. After all, it will save them a tremendous amount of time and money so the investment is easy to justify. Because this is so unique and such a difficult problem, in spite of a noisy market there’s no danger those capabilities will be commoditized any time soon.
If true, it suggests that the statistical methods used by other vendors such as Autonomy and Google, for example, should perform in a similar manner.
My view on this automation and prediction angle is that Recommind’s approach works well. If we accept that statement, what will happen if Autonomy or Google offers a lower-cost service. Might that shift some customers toward the lower-cost service. Numbers are numbers.
In a price war, Google—if it decides to push into the legal sector—might have an advantage over Autonomy with nearly $800 million in annual revenues. Recommind’s argument sets the stage for an interesting dynamic if larger firms go after this sector offering more value per dollar.
Excitement ahead in the fiercely contested and tumultuous legal market I “predict”.
Stephen E Arnold, February 27, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. Since I mentioned legal activity, I will report a no fee write up to the DOJ, an organization which cares about the law.
Is Content Management a Digital Titanic?
February 25, 2010
Content management is a moving target. Unlike search, CMS is supposed to generate a Web page or some other type of content product. The “leaders” in content management systems or CMS seem to disappearing into larger organizations. Surprising. If CMS were healthy, why aren’t these technology outfits growing like crazy and spinning off tons of cash?
I am no expert in CMS. In fact, I am not an expert in anything unlike the azure chip consultants, poobahs, and pundits who profess deep knowing at the press of a mouse button. In my experience, CMS emerged from people not having an easy way to produce HTML pages that could be displayed in a browser.
If HTML was too tough for some people, imagine the pickle barrel in which these folks find themselves today. In order to create a Web site, more than HTML is required. The crowd who relied on Microsoft’s Front Page find themselves struggling with the need to make Web pages work as applications or bundles of applications with some static brochureware thrown in for good measure.
To make a Web site today, technical know how is an absolute must. Even the very good point-and-click services from SquareSpace.com and Weebly.com can baffle some people.
The azure chip consultants, the mavens, and the poobahs want to be in the lifeboats. Women and children to the rear. Source: http://www.ronnestam.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/lifeboat_change_advertising_sinking.jpg
Move the need for a dynamic Web site into a big organization that is not good at technology, and you have a recipe for disaster. In fact, the wreckage created by some content management vendors, pundits, and integrators is of significant magnitude. There’s the big hassle in Australia over a blue chip CMS implementation that does not work. The US Senate went after the bluest of the blue chip integrators because a CMS could not generate a single Web page. Sigh.
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