Recommind Hits $70 Million
September 16, 2015
A video from the Big Data Landscape, part of their Big Data TV series, brings us an interview with Recommind’s CEO, Bob Tennant. The 11-and-a-half minute video and its transcript appear under the headline, “How Recommind Grew to $70M in Big Data Revenue.”
The interview by Dave Feinleib explores Recommind’s right-moves-at-the-right-time origin story, what its intelligence and eDiscovery software does, and why Tennant is confident the company will continue to thrive. This successful CEO also offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in any field, so check out the video or transcript for those words of wisdom.
Interestingly, the technology Tennant describes reminds us of early Autonomy methods [pdf]. He discusses working with unstructured data:
“So what you have to do is try to understand at a deeper level what’s happening semantically. What Recommind does is marry up a very highly scalable system for dealing with unstructured information– and the kind of database you need for doing that is different than what you would utilize for online transaction processing. But it also marries that up with a very deep knowledge of machine learning, which is the root of the company and where our post-docs were doing their research, to help understand what the key pieces of information in the sea of textual stuff are. And once you understand the key pieces, then you can put that into applications for further use or you can provide it to business intelligence applications to make sense of, or you can feed it elsewhere. But that’s very different from dealing with very structured data that most people are familiar with.”
Launched in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, Recommind provides search-powered analysis and governance solutions to customers around the world. The company’s Malolo technology stack is built upon their CORE information management platform.
Cynthia Murrell, September 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Where’s the Finish Line Enterprise Search?
September 16, 2015
What never ceases to amaze me is that people are always perplexed when goals for technology change. It always comes with a big hullabaloo and rather than complaining about the changes, time would be better spent learning ways to adapt and learn from the changes. Enterprise search is one of those technology topics that sees slow growth, but when changes occur they are huge. Digital Workplace Group tracks the newest changes in enterprise search, explains why they happened, and how to adapt: “7 Ways The Goal Posts On Enterprise Search Have Moved.”
After spending an inordinate amount of explaining how the author arrived at the seven ways enterprise search has changed, we are finally treated to the bulk of the article. Among the seven reasons are obvious insights that have been discussed in prior articles on Beyond Search, but there are new ideas to ruminate about. Among the obvious are that users want direct answers, they expect search to do more than find information, and understanding a user’s intent. While the obvious insights are already implemented in search engines, enterprise search lags behind.
Enterprise search should work on a more personalized level due it being part of a closed network and how people rely on it to fulfill an immediate need. A social filter could be applied to display a user’s personal data in search results and also users rely on the search filter as a quick shortcut feature. Enterprise search is way behind in taking advantage of search analytics and how users consume and manipulate data.
“To summarize everything above: Search isn’t about search; it’s about finding, connecting, answers, behaviors and productivity. Some of the above changes are already here within enterprises. Some are still just being tested in the consumer space. But all of them point to a new phase in the life of the Internet, intranets, computer technology and the experience of modern, digital work.”
As always there is a lot of room for enterprise search improvement, but these changes need to made for an updated and better work experience.
Whitney Grace, September 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Hewlett Packard Autonomy: Bank Issues Alleged
September 15, 2015
“The Price of Silence on Wall Street” provides a bit of information about the role of intermediaries in the HP deal for Autonomy. I find it difficult to figure out if the bank was doing its normal sales job for a juicy deal or if the bank was doing some fancy dancing.
Here are portions of the write up I highlighted when I was out of Internet range in a far off land. There is some value to printing online article for offline reading.
Item 1:
He [a bank whistle blower] says he believes people need to know about certain acts related to Barclays’ role in Hewlett-Packard’s $11.1 billion acquisition of Autonomy, a British software company, in 2011. Barclays was a financial adviser to HP on the deal and the sole provider of a one-year, $8.3 billion loan to be used, in part, by HP to buy Autonomy. Since then, the Autonomy acquisition has generally been viewed as a disaster. In 2012, HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion, and said that some $5 billion of it stemmed from a willful misrepresentation by Autonomy’s management of the company’s financial performance (Autonomy’s management disagreed, and the two sides headed to court).
Item 2:
Mr. Sivere [bank whistle blower] says he believes there is more to the HP story, in particular that Barclays may have breached its internal ethical walls regarding the deal, allowing some confidential information from the banking side of Barclays to be used by Barclays traders. He reached this conclusion in his role as a compliance officer and after he saw internal digital correspondence between the two groups that made him nervous that the wall had been breached. In 2013, Mr. Sivere tells me, he filed an internal report at Barclays that questioned the ethics and legality of what he had witnessed. He reported his concern that confidentiality had been breached around certain foreign-exchange trades; around so-called Contracts for Difference trades, known as C.F.D.s; and around certain representations that Barclays had made to HP when it provided the $8.8 billion loan.
Item 3:
Mr. Sivere wrote in his letter to the Barclays board, he also believed that Barclays entered into certain suspicious derivative transactions with HP at the time of the Autonomy acquisition. “Some of these transactions included FX trades, a dollar/sterling option and C.F.D.s traded prior to the announcement (and also the bridge loan pegged to a possible manipulated Libor rate),” he wrote. “The unwinding of such derivative transactions most likely occurred during 2012 which should have raised suspicions of what exactly the Hewlett-Packard write-down was related to if not for Autonomy’s purported accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures.
The article includes other interesting information. I urge you to read it.
My view is that the HP Autonomy deal remains interesting to me. The amount HP paid for Autonomy set a high water mark for a content processing acquisition. This write up suggests that there is information about the deal which has not been revealed in publicly accessible articles.
The parallels with the Fast Search & Transfer matter may be worth exploring.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2015
Lexmark Chases New Revenue: Printers to DTM
September 11, 2015
I know what a printer is. The machine accepts instructions and, if the paper does not jam, outputs something I can read. Magic.
I find it interesting to contemplate my printers and visualize them as an enterprise content management system. Years ago, my team and I had to work on a project in the late 1990s involving a Xerox DocuTech scanner and printer. The idea was that the scanner would convert a paper document to an image with many digital features. Great idea, but the scanner gizmo was not talking to the printer thing. We got them working and shipped the software, the machines, and an invoice to the client. Happy day. We were paid.
The gap between that vision from a Xerox unit and the reality of the hardware was significant. But many companies have stepped forward to convert knowledge resident systems relying on experienced middle managers to hollowed out outfits trying to rely on software. My recollection is that Fulcrum Technologies nosed into this thorn bush with DOCSFulcrum a decade before the DocuTech was delivered by a big truck to my office. And, not to forget our friends to the East, the French have had a commitment to this approach to information access. Today, one can tap Polyspot or Sinequa for business process centric methods.
The question is, “Which of these outfits is making enough money to beat the dozens of outfits running with the other bulls in digital content processing land?” (My bet is on the completely different animals described in my new study CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access.)
Years later I spoke with an outfit called Brainware. The company was a reinvention of an earlier firm, which I think was called SER or something like that. Brainware’s idea was that its system could process text which could be scanned or in a common file format. The index allowed a user to locate text matching a query. Instead of looking for words, Brainware system used trigrams (sequences of three letters) to locate similar content.
Similar to the Xerox idea. The idea is not a new one.
I read two write ups about Lexmark, which used to be part of IBM. Lexmark is just down the dirt road from me in Lexington, Kentucky. Its financial health is a matter of interest for some folks in there here parts.
The first write up was “How Lexmark Evolved into an Enterprise Content Management Contender.” The main idea pivots on my knowing what content management is. I am not sure what this buzzword embraces. I do know that organizations have minimal ability to manage the digital information produced by employees and contractors. I also know that most organizations struggle with what their employees do with social media. Toss in the penchant units of a company have for creating information silos, and most companies look for silver bullets which may solve a specific problem in the firm’s legal department but leave many other content issues flapping in the wind.
According to the write up:
Lexmark is "moving from being a hardware provider to a broader provider of higher-value solutions, which are hardware, software and services," Rooke [a Lexmark senor manager] said.
Easy to say. The firm’s financial reports suggest that Lexmark faces some challenges. Google’s financial chart for the outfit displays declining revenues and profits:
The Brainware, ISYS Search Software, and Kofax units have not been able to provide the revenue boost I expected Lexmark to report. HP and IBM, which have somewhat similar strategies for their content processing units, have also struggled. My thought is that it may be more difficult for companies which once were good at manufacturing fungible devices to generate massive streams of new revenue from fuzzy stuff like software.
The write up does not have a hint of the urgency and difficulty of the Lexmark task. I learned from the article:
Lexmark is its own "first customer" to ensure that its technologies actually deliver on the capabilities and efficiency gains promoted by the company, Moody [Lexmark senior manager] said. To date, the company has been able to digitize and automate incoming data by at least 90 percent, contributing to cost reductions of 25 percent and a savings of $100 million, he reported. Cost savings aside, Lexmark wants to help CIOs better and more efficiently incorporate unstructured data from emails, scanned documents and a variety of other sources into their business processes.
The sentiment is one I encountered years ago. My recollection is that the precursor of Convera explained this approach to me in the 1980s when the angle was presented as Excalibur Technologies.
The words today are as fresh as they were decades ago. The challenge, in my opinion, remains.
I also read “How to Build an Effective Digital Transaction Management Platform.” This article is also eWeek, from the outfit which published “How Lexmark Evolved” piece.
What does this listicle state about Lexmark?
I learned that I need a digital transaction management system. A what? A DTM looks like workflow and information processing. I get it. Digital printing. Instead of paper, a DTM allows a worker to create a Word file or an email. Ah, revolutionary. Then a DTM automates the workflow. I think this is a great idea, but I seem to recall that many companies offer these services. Then I need to integrate my information. There goes the silo even if regulatory or contractual requirements suggest otherwise. Then I can slice and dice documents. My recollection is that firms have been automating document production for a while. Then I can use esignatures which are trustworthy. Okay. Trustworthy. Then I can do customer interaction “anytime, anywhere.” I suppose this is good when one relies on innovative ways to deal with customer questions about printer drivers. And I cannot integrate with “enterprise content management.” Oh, oh. I thought enterprise content management was sort of a persistent, intractable problem. Well, not if I include “process intelligence and visibility.” Er, what about those confidential documents relative to a legal dispute?
The temporal coincidence of a fluffy Lexmark write up and the listicle suggest several things to me:
- Lexmark is doing the content marketing that public relations and advertising professionals enjoy selling. I assume that my write up, which you are reading, will be an indication of the effectiveness of this one-two punch.
- The financial reports warrant some positive action. I think that closing significant deals and differentiating the Lexmark services from those of OpenText and dozens of other firms would have been higher on the priority list.
- Lexmark has made a strategic decision to use the rocket fuel of two ageing Atlas systems (Brainware and ISYS) and one Saturn system (Kofax’s Kapow) to generate billions in new revenue. I am not confident that these systems can get the payload into orbit.
Net net: Lexmark is following a logic path already stomped on by Hewlett Packard and IBM, among others. In today’s economic environment, how many federating, digital business process, content management systems can thrive?
My hunch is that the Lexmark approach may generate revenue. Will that revenue be sufficient to compensate for the decline in printer and ink revenues?
What are Lexmark’s options? Based on these two eWeek write ups, it seems as if marketing is the short term best bet. I am not sure I need another buzzword for well worn concepts. But, hey, I live in rural Kentucky and know zero about the big city views crafted down the road in Lexington, Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, September 11, 2015
Coveo: A Real Life Search Implementation Success
September 11, 2015
If we detect some serious Coveo cheerleading in this recent article found on RT Insights, that might be because the story originated at that company. Still, “How Real-Time Enterprise Search Helps Seal Financial Deals” does illustrate the advantages of consolidating data resources into a more easily-used system.
The write-up describes challenges faced by London investment firm 3i Group. The global company had been collecting an abundance of data about its clients’ deals, but was spending many worker hours retrieving that information from scattered repositories. Coveo Enterprise Search to the rescue! The platform implementation included a user-friendly UI, actionable analytics, and security measures. The article continues:
“As a result of the implementation, 3i Group reports 90 percent faster access to deal-related intelligence as well as a 20 percent reduction in staff and resources required to respond to compliance requests. 3i Group’s staff members use the platform to search across 3.66 million file share documents, 6.39 million Exchange emails, 897,000 SharePoint documents, and 107 million Enterprise Vault records. For the first time, 3i Group staff members are able to perform a single search across all of the company’s knowledge repositories by using either a browser-based interface or an integrated search interface within SharePoint. 3i Group’s compliance team was provided with a dashboard that enabled them to search and correlate content from across 3i Group’s entire data set, and quickly evaluate permissions and user access rights for every 3i Group record or knowledge asset.”
Founded in 2005, Coveo maintains offices in California and the Netherlands, with its R&D headquarters in Quebec. (The company is also hiring as of this writing.)There is no doubt that being able to reach and analyze all data from one dashboard can be a huge time-saver, especially for a large organization. Just remember that Coveo is but one of several strong options; some are even open source.
Cynthia Murrell, September 11, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
IHS Mines Gartner for Goldfire
September 10, 2015
If you want to read a “pat Goldfire on the back” statement, navigate to “IHS is Recognized as a Visionary in Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search.”
I assume you, gentle reader, are up to speed on Invention Machine. No, strike that. You are up to speed on Goldfire, the IHS (Information Handling Service) enterprise search system.
If not, you can dig into the news release for details about how Goldfire can, and I quote:
- Decrease product development cycle time
- Increase the innovation pipeline
- Accelerate market share and competitive position
- Drives top-line margin expansion, and
- Increase productivity gains
There’s not much about search and retrieval, but that’s a minor detail.
What’s important in the news release is this statement which appears in the IHS Magic Quadrant write up about Goldfire:
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
There it is. The “research” is opinion based.” I think I understand that a Gartner report is not to “be construed as statements of fact.” Okay. I did not know that because I understood (obviously incorrectly) that a rigorous analytic process formed the foundation of the vendor selection and categorization.
Guess not. Wow. Who knew? Oh, I know. The PR firms issuing news releases from enterprise search vendors who are leaders, visionaries, etc.
Stephen E Arnold, September 10, 2015
Sinequa and Microsoft SharePoint: The Emperor Has No Search!
September 9, 2015
The French are endlessly entertaining. A number of information access outfits have emerged from the super sophisticated French academic machine. Most of these outfits are mostly unknown outside of France. I am not sure about the reason. For example, have you been keeping pace with the push of Antidot, Dassault Exalead, and Polyspot into the US market? Are you tracking the Spotter acquisition? What about the open source search solutions available?
I was in the wilds of Canada. A reader sent me a link to a LinkedIn thread about Gartner’s absolutely fantastic analyses of enterprise search. (Nope, don’t fret. I won’t rehash my earlier comments about this brilliant piece of work. I will not remind you that the report omitted a few outfits.)
On with the mission.
The post was/is “Don’t Forget These Solutions That Did NOT Qualify for 2015 Gartner MQ on Enterprise Search” and written by a professional at the consulting firm Search Technologies. (Search Technologies has some of its roots in the Excalibur/ConQuest/Convera era I believe). The “MQ” is the author’s way of referencing the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Yes, indeed, it is magic.
The author pointed out that Gartner ignored based on its extensive quantitative and poetical analyses Endeca (an Oracle outfit), Microsoft SharePoint (owner of the outstanding Fast Search & Transfer Technology from the late 1990s), Elasticsearch (which is now Elastic and inking deals in second string outfits like Goldman Sachs), and MarkLogic (which I think may be a data management system).
The meat of the thread was this comment by one of France’s most prescient experts on information access, who is also hooked up with Sinequa and presumably reflects the collective insight of that firm, which was founded in 2002.
Sinequa wrote:
Sorry, Graham but SharePoint is not an enterprise search platform. [Editor: We fixed the punctuation and spelling of SharePoint, gentle reader.]
Okay, there you have it. Two outfits disagree about search in SharePoint. Both are in the search game. Both are clearly wizards and mavens in the search thing.
I would humbly submit that Microsoft indeed does offer search in SharePoint. The methods can be mind breakers. See, for example, this write up about crawled properties in SharePoint 2013.
Better yet, check out the “Search in SharePoint 2013” from the horse’s mouth or as Donald Trump prefers, the horse’s whatever.
I want to reflect on what the statement “Sorry, Graham but SharePoint is not an enterprise search platform.”
My thoughts are:
- Sinequa is an enterprise search platform. If SharePoint is not an enterprise search platform, therefore, you, gentle reader, must license the French system Sinequa to deliver you to information access heaven. If you sign the deal in Paris, you may be delivered to an okay French restaurant.
- SharePoint is a box of Legos. Once a licensee builds something like a content management system for employees, there is absolutely no way whatsoever to look up if the person in the next cube or on contract and working from Starbuck’s is in the system. Wrong. Dear, dear Microsoft provides. Goodness, even Windows 10 offers a way to find a person if an expert has cracked the SharePoint and Windows 10 permissions and access codes.
- Sinequa is just reminding a consultant that real information access vendors do not make silly mistakes. I find that when I mispronounce a French word or phrase, native French speakers are ever so helpful. My fave is faire le pont, which means take more days off.
Why do I trouble myself to write this?
First, the silliness of arguing with the Gartner’s mathematical analyses of enterprise search vendors warrants not one whit of criticism. Perfection has been attained. This is not a European Philae lander bounce around thing.
Second, Sinequa feels strongly that Graham definitely needs to be set straight. Who better than a vendor of information access systems which was sidestepped by Microsoft when it was tire kicking before the 2008 Fast Search acquisition? Is there a sour French whine?
Third, LinkedIn loves these threads which attract a robust two comments. There are so many LinkedIn members involved in enterprise search. I mean two comments. Be still my heart.
What’s that say about Gartner? What’s that say about enterprise search? What’s that say about LinkedIn?
Answer: Three Michelin stars for paupiettes de porc.
Stephen E Arnold, September 9, 2015
IBM Enterprise Search without Watson
September 6, 2015
Where’s Watson?
The question was not answered at this IBM Enterprise Search page.
After the hyperbole added to the Watson search, smart software, analytics, cancer curing, recipe making thing—I expected more from Big Blue.
The verbiage and the list of sources does not allude to Watson, the future of informatio0n access.
What I learned was:
- OmniFind is still with us
- Search requires IBM Content Analytics
- If you want to index DB2, you have to license the IBM InfoSphere Federation Server
- Lots of hardware and storage are on the horizon either on premises or in the cloud or via a hybrid solution.
Confused? Not me.
I expected more than a collection of ageing systems which must be built from dozens of components.
In my opinion, enterprise search at IBM has been designed to create consulting and engineering services revenue.
Maybe Watson cannot answer this question for IBM, “What is the optimal way to facilitate information access with Watson?”
The void speaks loudly to me.
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2015
Watson Speaks Naturally
September 3, 2015
While there are many companies that offer accurate natural language comprehension software, completely understanding the complexities of human language still eludes computers. IBM reports that it is close to overcoming the natural language barriers with IBM Watson Content Analytics as described in “Discover And Use Real-World Terminology With IBM Watson Content Analytics.”
The tutorial points out that any analytics program that only relies on structured data loses about four fifths of information, which is a big disadvantage in the big data era, especially when insights are supposed to be hidden in the unstructured. The Watson Content Analytics is a search and analytics platform and it uses rich-text analysis to find extract actionable insights from new sources, such as email, social media, Web content, and databases.
The Watson Content Analytics can be used in two ways:
- “Immediately use WCA analytics views to derive quick insights from sizeable collections of contents. These views often operate on facets. Facets are significant aspects of the documents that are derived from either metadata that is already structured (for example, date, author, tags) or from concepts that are extracted from textual content.
- Extracting entities or concepts, for use by WCA analytics view or other downstream solutions. Typical examples include mining physician or lab analysis reports to populate patient records, extracting named entities and relationships to feed investigation software, or defining a typology of sentiments that are expressed on social networks to improve statistical analysis of consumer behavior.”
The tutorial runs through a domain specific terminology application for the Watson Content Analytics. The application gets very intensive, but it teaches how Watson Content Analytics is possibly beyond the regular big data application.
Whitney Grace, September 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Maverick Search and Match Platform from Exorbyte
August 31, 2015
The article titled Input Management: Exorbyte Automates the Determination of Identities on Business On (a primarily German language website) promotes the Full Page Entity Detect from Exorbyte. Exorbyte is a world leader in search and match for large volumes of data. They boast clients in government, insurance, input management and ICT firms, really any business with identity resolution needs. The article stresses the importance of pulling information from masses of data in the modern office. They explain,
“With Full Page Entity Detect provides exorbyte a solution to the inbox of several million incoming documents.This identity data of the digitized correspondence (can be used for correspondence definition ) extract with little effort from full-text documents such as letters and emails and efficiently compare them with reference databases. The input management tool combines a high fault tolerance with accuracy, speed and flexibility.Gartner, the software company from Konstanz was recently included in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search.”
The company promises that their Matchmaker technology is unrivaled in searching text without restrictions, even without language, allowing for more accurate search. Full Page Entity Detect is said to be particularly useful when it comes to missing information or overlooked errors, since the search is so thorough.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 31 , 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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