Eaagle Text Processing Swoops In
September 26, 2008
Eaagle Software announced the availability of Full Text Mapper (FTM), a desktop software program that provides analysis of unstructured data. Eaagle Software brings together advanced text mining technology and desktop computing. ‘Our philosophy is that text mining and data analysis tools should be easy-to-use and not require any particular skills,’ states Yves Kergall, president and CEO of Eaagle. ‘Our software doesn’t require any setup or predefinition to begin discovering knowledge. Simply highlight the information, launch FTM, and instantly visualize your data to begin your analysis…it is that easy.’ You can read the full news story here. For more information about Eaagle, navigate to the company’s Web site here. A single user license is about $4,000.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
Autonomy: Compliance Initiative
September 23, 2008
Autonomy bought Zantaz in July 2007 for $375 million. The company continues to enrich its compliance line of services. For example, Autonomy has been quick to roll out services that need information management, search, and content processing. Examples include the firm’s Zantaz bundle described here in April 2008, and its recent compliance with the UK’s FSA Conduct of Business Sourcebook (COBS) requirements. Competitors in the search, content processing, and records management markets will want to pay close attention to what Autonomy is doing. I’ve been convinced for several years that Autonomy is one of the quickest reacting search vendors. New opportunities appear in Autonomy’s marketing collateral and news releases with greater precision than in the mid range consultants’ reports about industry trends. Autonomy has a nose for trends and beats many of its competitors to these markets.
As I was thinking about Autonomy, I recalled an article that appeared in Silicon Valley Watcher in April 2008. I was able to locate a copy of that article here. Written by Tom Foremski, the write up had the zippy title “A Policeman Inside Your Commuter and Inside Your Corporate Blog. Autonomy Releases Software that Flags Illegal Communications and Other Corporate Content.” For me, the most interesting comment in the article was:
There are some good and bad aspects to this software. The bad is a big brother type use for it…It could be used to restrict blogging. A lot of people tell me that large corporations are scared of blogs violating a regulation and so every corporate blog entry has to be run through lawyers– it has to be “lawyered.” This can take time, days, even weeks. Paradoxically, I think AIG could be used to clear a blog post in real-time and could thus increase the amount of good, legal information that company workers can share in public. Either way, it automates some of the tasks of a lawyer…. Less lawyering, means lower operating costs, which maximize share holder value, and that’s what corporate officers are required to do.
With the great concern about Google I heard in my various meetings in Europe last week, I was surprised that most of those Google critics were blissfully ignorant of vendors such as Autonomy who have robust tools for monitoring available and in use. I suppose the difference is that an organization can monitor in order to comply with regulations. In the next month or so, I want to profile some of the companies with content monitoring systems. I will pick a handful of representative companies. Google’s not the only game in town, not by a long shot.
Stephen Arnold, September 22, 2008
Autonomy: Compliance Initiative
September 22, 2008
Autonomy bought Zantaz in July 2007 for $375 million. The company continues to enrich its compliance line of services. For example, Autonomy has been quick to roll out services that need information management, search, and content processing. Examples include the firm’s Zantaz bundle described here in April 2008, and its recent compliance with the UK’s FSA Conduct of Business Sourcebook (COBS) requirements. Competitors in the search, content processing, and records management markets will want to pay close attention to what Autonomy is doing. I’ve been convinced for several years that Autonomy is one of the quickest reacting search vendors. New opportunities appear in Autonomy’s marketing collateral and news releases with greater precision than in the mid range consultants’ reports about industry trends. Autonomy has a nose for trends and beats many of its competitors to these markets.
As I was thinking about Autonomy, I recalled an article that appeared in Silicon Valley Watcher in April 2008. I was able to locate a copy of that article here. Written by Tom Foremski, the write up had the zippy title “A Policeman Inside Your Commuter and Inside Your Corporate Blog. Autonomy Releases Software that Flags Illegal Communications and Other Corporate Content.” For me, the most interesting comment in the article was:
There are some good and bad aspects to this software. The bad is a big brother type use for it…It could be used to restrict blogging. A lot of people tell me that large corporations are scared of blogs violating a regulation and so every corporate blog entry has to be run through lawyers– it has to be “lawyered.” This can take time, days, even weeks. Paradoxically, I think AIG could be used to clear a blog post in real-time and could thus increase the amount of good, legal information that company workers can share in public. Either way, it automates some of the tasks of a lawyer…. Less lawyering, means lower operating costs, which maximize share holder value, and that’s what corporate officers are required to do.
With the great concern about Google I heard in my various meetings in Europe last week, I was surprised that most of those Google critics were blissfully ignorant of vendors such as Autonomy who have robust tools for monitoring available and in use. I suppose the difference is that an organization can monitor in order to comply with regulations. In the next month or so, I want to profile some of the companies with content monitoring systems. I will pick a handful of representative companies. Google’s not the only game in town, not by a long shot.
Stephen Arnold, September 22, 2008
Search: Moving Up the Buzzword Chain of Being
September 20, 2008
In one of my university required courses, the professor revealed the secrets of “the great chain of being”. After 45 years, my recollection of Dr. Pearce’s lecture are fuzzy, but I recall at the top of the chain was God, then angels, and then a pecking order of creatures. Down at the bottom were paramecia like me.
Search terminology works like this I concluded after giving my talk at Erik Hartmann’s conference in Utrecht. I prepared for my remarks by talking with a dozen vendors exhibiting at the conference. I also listened to various presenters for five to 15 minutes. I had to limit my listening in order to get a representative sampling of the topics and interests of the conference attendees.
What I concluded was:
- People perceive Google as a Web search company that sells ads. In this biased sample, I noted a discomfort about Google’s growing dominance of digital information. I did not hear any one criticize Google, but I sensed a growing concern about privacy, scope, traffic, etc. I remain excited about Google and probably come across as a Google cheerleader, which annoyed some of the people with whom I spoke.
- Vendors and consultants who once hawked content management, records management, and enterprise search have changed their tune. Instead of talking about CMS, EDM, and other smart sounding acronyms, the vendors are pulling terminology out of MBA lexicons. (More about this in a moment.)
- The people listening to these talks, including mine, hunger–even plead–for solutions to challenges arising from their inability to find needed information, manage terabytes of digital “stuff” in their offices, and create a solution that does not require constant spoon feeding.
The result is that “old” solutions and half baked solutions are wrapped in new terminology taken from a higher level in the “great chain of buzzwords”. Here’s an example: instead of saying “enterprise search” or “behind the firewall search”, some vendors talked about “information access” and “findability” whatever that means. The lesser word is search, which most people seemed to agree was uninteresting, which is a code word for “does not work”. The words “information access” come from a loftier position on the buzzword “great chain of being”. The vendors are sounding more like McKinsey and Booz, Allen known nothings than subject matter experts.
A representation of the Great Chain of Being. Image source: http://www.kheper.net/topics/greatchainofbeing/Steps.gif
Consider this example: “business process management”. This is definitely a buzzword from a loftier position on the buzzword “great chain of being”. “BPM” is in the Heaven category, not Stone or Flame category. But I don’t know what BPM means. I think the folks using this word want to avoid precise definitions because that limits their freedom. Implying that “BPM” will solve a problem is easier than actually diagnosing the problem and solving it. “BPM” was the acronym of the conference. Presenters from publishers, consultancies, and vendors inserting this three letter token for what seemed like a pretty basic notion; that is, the steps needed to complete a task. Since search and content management are losers in the revenue generating department, folks engaged in these activities now talk about BPM. Old wine, new bottles but the labels have buzzwords from higher in the “great chain of being”.
STR: More and Better Self Service Business Intelligence
September 16, 2008
When I was at university, the advanced statistics course meant learning SAS. I remember my feeling when I finished the course. I had been beaten into a “SAS person.” Today, some university graduates don’t want to wrestle with statistics again. Most people, in my opinion, forget the chi squared test of homogeneity after the final exam.
Recognizing that organizations need access to crunched data in a meaningful form, Space Time Research has labored to create self service business intelligence. The company’s strategy seems to be working, and I know that the number herders recognize that a challenge to the SPSS and SAS approach is building.
Space-Time Research is one of the global leader in self-Service business intelligence for government. The company–based in Australia–has offices in the US and the UK. The STR SuperSTAR Platform is an end-to-end solution providing self-service analytics and business intelligence, interactive web publishing, privacy and confidentiality protection, mapping and visualization. The company has released a new version of its SuperSTAR Platform. The release includes a Data Control Application Programming Interface (API) that provides a ‘plug and play’ approach to privacy and confidentiality mechanisms. The API allows use of STR integrated techniques, accepted protection and confidentiality products, or custom confidentiality rules. These techniques and rules are applied to ad-hoc queries on unit record and aggregate data when a request for information is processed. You can read ARnet.com’s take on the new version here. The MarketWatch write up is here.
You can download a two page brochure that provides more information about the self service interface. Click here. You may have to register to get the download to work. Take a look. Cloud-based business intelligence is going to gain importance. More information about STR is available at the company’s Web site here.
Stephen Arnold, September 16, 2008
eDiscovery: Speed Bumps Annoy Billing Attorneys
September 12, 2008
A happy quack to my Australian reader who called “eDiscovery Performance Still a Worry”. The article by Greg McNevin appeared on the IDM.net.au Web site on September 10, 2008. The main point of the write up is that 60 percent of those polled about their organization’s eDiscovery litigation support system said, “Dog slow.” The more felicitous wording chosen by Mr. McNevin was:
The survey also found that despite 80 percent of organisations claiming to have made an investment in IT to address discovery challenges, 60 percent of respondents think their IT department is not always able to deliver information quickly enough for them to do their legal job efficiently.
The survey was conducted by Dynamic Markets, who polled 300 in house legal eagles in the Uk, Germany, and the Netherlands. My hunch is that the 60 percent figure may well apply in North America as well. My own research unearthed the fact that two thirds of the users of enterprise search systems were dissatisfied with those systems. The 60 percent score matches up well.
In my view, the larger implication of this CommVault study is that when it comes to text and content processing, more than half the users go away annoyed or use the system whilst grumbling and complaining.
What are vendors doing? There’s quite a bit of activity in the eDiscovery arena. More gladiators arrive to take the place of those who fall on their swords, get bought as trophies, or die at hands of another gladiator. Sadly, the activity does not address the issue of speed. In the sense for this context, “speed” in not three millisecond response time. “Speed” means transforming content, updating indexes, and generating the reports needed to figure out what information is where in the discovered information.
Many vendors are counting on Intel to solve the “speed” problem. I don’t think faster chips will do much, however. The “speed” problem is that eDiscovery relies on a great many processes. Lawyers, in general, have a need for what’s required to meet a deadline. There’s little reason for them to trouble their keen legal minds with such details as content throughput, malformed XML, flawed metatagging, and trashed indexes after an index update.
eDiscovery’s dissatisfaction score mirrors the larger problems with search and content processing. There’s no fix coming that will convert a grim black and white image to a Kodachrome version of reality.
Stephen Arnold, September 12, 2008
Stratify: Discovery System 3.x
September 9, 2008
by Nicholas E. Stover for Beyond Search
Basics
Stratify—formerly Purple Yogi—provides eDiscovery services intended to help attorneys minimize the resources needed to analyze and manage documents. The company is owned by Iron Mountain, a diversified records management company. More specifically, technology provided by Stratify aids in the search, retrieval, and management of information required for a legal matter. Founded in 1999, the company has offices in Mountain View, California, Boston, Massachusetts, and Bangalore, India. Stratify can found on the Web at www.stratify.com.
Product
Stratify Discovery System 3.x employs statistical and other methods to identify named people, places, and proper nouns from any collection of documents, including content from network file servers, content management systems, Web sites, and data fields. The indexed information and metadata are categorized into the system’s taxonomy, which can be modified by a licensee. Stratify provides a key word search and retrieval system to allow attorneys and paralegals to locate information processed by the system.
Stratify includes several interesting features; for example, the ability processing documents in multiple languages; inclusion of text mining functions; automatically creating dynamic taxonomies; providing discovery interfaces for reporting and analysis; and function to identify relationships between and among people, locations, organizations and topics.
Customers
The firm’s customers include law firms, corporate legal departments, and US intelligence agencies. Thomson Reuters uses the system. Stratify helps reduce the need for human indexers. Other customers include NASA, the Department of Education, and Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs.
Strengths
The major advantage of Stratify is that the company’s system has been optimized for eDiscovery and manipulation of information generated in legal matters. The company was an early entrant in the text mining sector. The firm’s product now includes visualization tools. The utility of these ways of viewing query results will vary from licensee to licensee. Now included are “heat maps” (to show the user hot spots, neighbor maps (showing topics or entities that have a direct, non-mediated relationship to each other), and network graphs (sometimes called social graphs) to help identify direct and indirect relationships between entities.
Weaknesses
Stratify systems begin in the $100,000 range. This license fee does not include customization or additional engineering services required by the licensee. Over the years, the system benefits from the involvement of a subject matter expert. An organization with little or no experience with enterprise search is not likely to understand or benefit from the software.
Price
Current pricing for the Stratify 3.x system begins at about $100,000. A custom price quote is required.
Summary
The Stratify software search-and-retrieval system lacks some of the case management functions that certain competitors are now bundling with their eDiscovery systems. Performance can be an issue if the system is not properly resourced.
Web site: www.stratify.com
LexisNexis and Interwoven: An Odd Couple
September 6, 2008
The for fee legal information sector looks like a consistent winner to those who don’t know the cost structures and marketing hassles of selling to attorneys, intelligence agencies, and law schools. Let’s review at a high level the sorry state of the legal information business in the United States. Europe and the Asia Pacific region are a different kitchen of torts.
Background
First, creating legal information is still a labor intensive operation. Automated processes can reduce some costs, but other types of legal metatagging still require the effort of attorneys or those with sufficient legal education to identify and correct egregious errors. As you may know, making a mistake when preparing for a major legal matter is not too popular with the law firms’ clients.
Second, attorneys and law firms make up one of those interesting markets. At one end there are lots and lots of attorneys who work in very small shops. Someone told me that 90 percent of the attorneys are involved with small firms or work in legal flea markets. Several attorneys get together, lease a space, and then offer desks to other attorneys. Everyone pays the overhead, and the group can pursue individual work or form a loose confederation if necessary. Other attorneys abandon ship. I don’t have data on the quitters in the US, but I know that one of my acquaintances in Louisville, Kentucky, gave up the law to become a public relations advisor. One of my resources is an attorney who works only on advising companies trying to launch an IPO. He hires attorneys, preferring to use his managerial skills without the mind numbingly dull work that many legal eagles perform.
Third, there are lots of attorneys who have to mind their pennies. Clients in tough economic times are less willing to pay wild and crazy legal bills. These often carry such useful line items as “Research, $2,300” or “Telephone call, $550”. I have worked as an expert witness and gained a tiny bit of insight into the billing and the push back some clients exert. Other clients don’t pay the bills, which makes life tough for partners who can’t buy a new BMW and for the low paid “associates” who can’t buy happiness or pay law school loans.
Fourth, most people know that prices for legal information are high, but there’s a growing realization that the companies with these expensive resources are starting to look a lot like monopolies. Running the only poker game in town makes some of the excluded players want options. In the last few years, I’ve run across services that a single person will start up to provide specific legal type information to colleagues because the blue chip companies were charging too much or delivering stale information at fresh baked bread prices.
Folks like Google.com, small publishers, trade associations, and the Federal government put legal information on Web servers and let people browse and download. Granted, some of the bells and whistles like the nifty footnotes that tell a legal eagle to look at a specific case for a precedent are missing. But some folks are quite happy to use the free services first. Then, as a last resort, will the abstemious legal eagle pay upwards of $250 per query to look up information in a WestLaw, LexisNexis, or other blue chip vendors’ specialist online file.
Google’s government index service sports what may presage the “new look” for other Google vertical search services. Check it out in the screen shot below. Notice that the search box is unchanged, but the page features categories of information.
Now run the query , district court decisions. Sorry about the screen shots, but you can navigate to this site and run your own queries. I ran the bound phrase “district court decisions”. Here’s what Google showed me:
Let me make three observations:
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