IDC Open Source Search Reports Announced
July 23, 2012
IDC has released the first of a series of analyses of open source search vendors. The subject of the report is LucidWords Platform. Lucid Imagination has become one of the key open source search vendors. Data for the IDC “situation overview, future outlook, and essential guidance” is a result of a painstaking process. The IDC research team interviewed principals of Lucid Imagination, conducted a technical analysis of the Lucid technology platform, and used a range of data analysis methods to pinpoint key information from open source content. In addition to detailed, jargon-free information about the Lucid Lucene/Solr approach, the report provides an unvarnished analysis of the firm’s business model.
Order the full report at tp://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=236086.
One of the important facts uncovered in the course of the research is the strong uptake of Lucid technology in specific market sectors. Also, Lucid, unlike some proprietary and other open source search vendors, has strong venture backing, revenue growth, and a full-time professional open source search technology team. Each of these issues is explored in the IDC report number 236086. You can get additional information about the for-fee report from IDC’s “Get Doc” online service.
The team working on this project included Sue Feldman, who specializes in research on information access technologies including, including search engines, text analytics, categorization, unified access to structured and unstructured information, Big Data, visualization, and rich media search. Her research analyzes the trends and dynamics of the search and discovery software market and also quantifies the costs of information work to the organization. Ms. Feldman won IDC’s James Peacock Research award for her work on modeling and forecasting the search and retrieval technology markets, and an Innovation Award from IDC in 2007 for developing a new research program on the digital marketplace. She is a frequent speaker at industry events, and has won several national and international awards for her writing. She wrote the chapter on search engines for the 1999 volume of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science and was the first editor of the IEEE Computer Society’s Digital Library News. She is currently writing a book, The Answer Machine concerning the future of technology for information access. Before coming to IDC in 2000, Ms. Feldman was President for twenty years of Datasearch, an independent technology consulting firm, where she consulted on new retrieval technologies such as natural language processing, search engines, usability of online systems, and digital libraries.
One Vision of the Future of Enterprise Architecture
July 22, 2012
SYS-Con Media recently published an article detailing the impact of Cloud, big data analytics and mobility on enterprise architecture in the article “The New Enterprise Reference Architecture.”
For those who do not already know, the term Enterprise Architecture refers to the process of moving business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise’s future state and enable its evolution.
This article is based on the assumption that a lot has changed over the past couple of years regarding the ways that enterprises chart their enterprise architecture. It provides readers with a diagram of “the new enterprise reference architecture” along with accompanying text providing a detailed explanation of the role of each layer.
When discussing the enterprise search layer, the article states:
“While the data virtualization layer provides a common layer to access all the disparate data sources, we still needed robust searching capabilities on top of it and hence this layer is important. Some of the attributes of this layer are :
- Keyword based search
- Auto Correction
- Thesaurus expansion
- Relevance Ranking
This layer works closely with the context aware content layer. Products like Microsoft FAST Search Engine, Google Search Engine will fall under this category.”
While the new enterprise architecture is more complex than the old one, it also is filled with more possibilities. Our only question is what happened to enterprise search as a platform?
Jasmine Ashton, July 22, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Microsoft Acquires Yammer to Develop Social Business Features for SharePoint
July 20, 2012
Byron Acohido discusses Microsoft’s recent Yammer acquisition in his USAToday.com article, “Microsoft’s Yammer Deal May Cost Too Much, Come Too Late.”
The author comments on the development:
Microsoft has been trying futilely for years to popularize social networking within SharePoint, its collaboration server that comes bundled with versions of its Office productivity suite sold to large businesses. By acquiring Yammer, the software giant is attempting to ‘fill a gap,’ says Wesley Miller, analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft. Similar to Facebook, Yammer connects users and claims more than 200,000 corporate customers, including Ford, Orbitz Worldwide and 7-Eleven.
Yammer will come onto Microsoft as a new division and David Sacks, a former PayPal exec and Yammer founder, will stay on as CEO. Social business is no doubt becoming a ubiquitous topic in the enterprise search world. To tap into new SharePoint possibilities, consider a third party solution to complete your enterprise search system.
We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Managing director Michael Hadrian explains the Mindbreeze solution:
Fabasoft Folio Cloud enables quick, secure and mobile collaboration both internally and between international companies. Business processes with customers and partners cannot be realized any quicker or more cost effectively…This enables worldwide connected collaboration and secure data exchange in protected team rooms.
For a complete search solution with the power of information pairing, check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, July 20, 2012
Sponsored by Polyspot
China Leads in PLM Market
July 20, 2012
Across the world companies in all industries are realizing the power of data management solutions. The manufacturing industry, in particular, is seeing a huge increase in the adoption of product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions. According to a recent Business Wire article, “PTC Named a Top Solution Provider in China’s Rapidly Growing PLM Market by Leading Industry Analyst Firm CIMdata”, China’s demand for PLM is the fastest growing in the world.
Peter Bilello, President of CIMdata, was quoted as saying,
“PTC continues to experience success in the China market due to the strength of its PLM offerings and its ongoing investment in the rapidly growing Chinese market. The China mainstream PLM market has repeatedly outpaced the growth of the global PLM market as Chinese manufacturers are paying more and more attention to product innovation and are fast improving their own R&D capabilities and processes by deploying PLM. PTC has established itself as a strong presence in the market and is well positioned to take advantage of market opportunities.”
While Chinese manufacturers may be an untapped market for PLM the United States has its fair share of equally underserved industries desperately needing PLM solutions. Small and midsized businesses (SMB) are the latest to gain access to PLM thanks to lowered costs, primarily due to cloud technology. As more American companies realize that PLM solutions virtually pay for themselves by streamlining processes, ending waste and stopping duplication we expect to see growth equal to that of China.
Catherine Lamsfuss, July 20, 2012
Developing a Framework for SharePoint Success
July 19, 2012
In “The Art of SharePoint Success: Epilogue – The Call to Action,” Symon Garfield writes his 20th and final installments of the Art of SharePoint Success series. The series explains a framework which aims to ensure long term, measurable return on your SharePoint investment with four elements: governance, strategy, architecture, and transition.
Garfield explains his consulting approach:
Broadly the aim of these engagements is to align SharePoint investments with strategic objectives and deliver a high-level medium term SharePoint roadmap. Depending on the client and their particular strategic lens I call the engagement something along the lines of, ‘Knowledge & Information Management Roadmap,’ ‘Collaboration Strategy,’ ‘SharePoint Roadmap.’…Regardless of the size of the organization, the numbers of people involved, or the size of the budgets, I aim to deliver the engagement in five days of work.
Garfield’s in-depth article may be worth bookmarking if you are in any stage of a SharePoint deployment. And we know budgets are tight and the economy has been shaky for a while. Everyone is taking a close look at dollars coming in and out of the business. The series may be worth a read to help you develop a roadmap for measuring ROI. Consider adding a comprehensive and cost-effective solution to your system for maximum ROI. Mindbreeze snaps seamlessly into the SharePoint system to give your users an enhanced search and navigation experience with secure, reliable, and efficient action. Read more about the solutions at http://www.mindbreeze.com/.
Philip West, July 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New Report Declares 2011 Set New PLM Records
July 19, 2012
Not so long ago the manufacturing industry was the primary user of product lifecycle management (PLM). All that has changed, however, thanks largely to advances in technology like the introduction of the cloud. Now, PLM solutions span across all industries and companies of all sizes. That has led to record breaking profits as described in the Ten Links article, “CIMdata Publishes PLM Trends Report”.
Stan Przybylinski, CIMdata’s Director of Research, was quoted as saying,
“While the global economy sputtered, the PLM economy grew faster than in 2010, which was a very good year. Most segments of the market that CIMdata tracks saw high double digit growth, with very strong license sales. Given that new license sales are often precursors to more software and services investment, this is a strong indicator that 2012 could be another solid year for PLM solution and services providers.”
One of the reasons PLM solutions has continues to grow despite economic challenges is the global awareness of data management. Big Data news tops headlines in all industry journals and data analytics providers are reaching out to new audiences at an increasing speed. PLM is simply a practical use of new data management solutions. We agree that 2012 will most likely top records once again proving that PLM is the answer to most production and cost related problems.
Catherine Lamsfuss, July 19, 2012
Text Analysis and Text Mining Are Powerful Tools
July 19, 2012
Text analysis and mining is one service that many data analytics firms offer their clients. AME Info has the latest news on how “SAS to Add High Performance Text Mining to Its Powerful In-Memory Analytics Software in Q3 2012.” SAS is one of the leading big data analytics companies and soon they will add Hugh-Performance Analytics to their Teradata and EMC Greenplum platforms to perform even more complex big data analytics. The new technology with new text-mining technology will give new insights into unstructured data from emails to social media quicker and more efficiently.
SAS is proud of the advancement:
” ‘High-performance analytics is the most significant SAS technology advance over the last 10 years,’ said Jim Goodnight, CEO, SAS. ‘We realized that organizations were accumulating massive amounts of data that could provide answers to questions they could never ask before. The analysis took so long to process, answers were irrelevant by the time the computer spit them out. High-performance analytics provides answers when the information is still useful and leaves time to explore multiple possibilities.’ “
Text analysis is a basic service and many companies are trying to find ways to make their services stand out in the crowd. We suggest that you look at the next generation text analysis vendors; for example, Ikanow.
Whitney Grace, July 19, 2012
Sponsored byIkanow
Community Comments on Need for Expanded SharePoint Blogging Features
July 18, 2012
In “Never Mind Microblogging, SharePoint Needs to Support Plain Old Blogging,” Chris Wright comments on social features in the SharePoint platform. Wright, founder of the Scribble Agency, shares his hope for the upcoming SharePoint 15 release,
With SharePoint 15 right around the corner we can only hope for some improvements from Microsoft. So what would be nice to see? Scheduling of posts would be a good start. Anyone who writes regularly will know it is often best to do it as and when ideas come to you, not necessarily when you want to publish. Scheduling would really help with this. Plus a dedicated stats component, just for blogging, would be good.
Wright also discusses Microsoft’s recent Yammer acquisition and the potential for the microblogging platform to expand SharePoint blogging features.
An out of the box design that keeps users in mind may not be SharePoint’s strongest characteristic. But it doesn’t take much to customize your farm to work for the masses. Instead of bogging down your SharePoint system with third party applications, save time and money on implementations with one lean solution. It seems the experts at Mindbreeze understand the importance of social business and continue to develop solutions to increase customer satisfaction.
Philip West, July 18, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Manufacturers Want Cost Control First and Foremost
July 18, 2012
Manufacturers have been hit hard by the economical shortcomings of nations around the world. What they are left with is less money to meet higher expectations from their customers. A recent DC Velocity article, “Cost control Remains the Top Supply Chain Goal for Manufacturers”, reveals where manufacturers priorities lay according to a recent survey.
As the article explains,
“In a report titled “Business Strategy: 2012 Supply Chain Survey-Manufacturing Priorities and New Technology Adoption,” IDC found that the number two goal was striving for agility in their supply chains. The third objective was product quality and safety, cited by 52 percent of survey takers. Survey respondents also said that “big data analysis” was the new technology that was most relevant to their business. “Big data analysis” involves the use of sophisticated software to sift through large amounts of disparate information to find connections or patterns.”
These results are not atypical from what product lifecycle management (PLM) solution providers report. Through a well-constructed PLM solution manufacturers are able to streamline processes, keep quality high while lowering costs and integrate data management solutions. One of our favorite PLM providers is Inforbix because they understand that at the heart of any PLM solution is data management. Their offerings focus on new data management solutions which pave the way for PLM victory.
Catherine Lamsfuss, July 18, 2012
Tips for SharePoint Integration from EPC Group Leader
July 17, 2012
Errin O’Connor, Founder and CEO for the SharePoint consultant firm EPC Group, focuses on implementing Microsoft technologies in organizations throughout the United States. In a recent Q & A article, “SharePoint Integration Considerations for Every Exchange Organization,” O’Connor provides some insight into taking full advantage of the SharePoint system, as well as Exchange and Outlook, in your organization.
O’Connor explains some lesser-known ways to use Exchange and Outlook with SharePoint,
SharePoint 2010 supports two-way synchronization. With that comes the ability to email-enable SharePoint lists like calendars, tasks, document libraries, discussion boards and contacts. Of course, you can also create custom alerts for actions taken on said lists. A lot of users don’t always take advantage of the option to manage SharePoint contacts from Outlook and don’t add SharePoint tasks or calendars into Outlook. Of course, we also want users to minimize the number of passwords or applications they interface with on a daily basis.
O’Connor also discusses SharePoint in large versus small companies, and that no matter the organization size, the IT team needs a passionate advocate for SharePoint and improved collaboration. The brief Q & A may be worth the read if you are embarking on increased SharePoint integration.
To increase user adoption, look to save employees’ time by connecting them to the right information via a user-friendly interface. We like the good reviews for the Fabasoft Mindbreeze suite of solutions. With clear navigation and a self-explanatory interface, Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise facilitates findability.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise finds every scrap of information within a very short time, whether document, contract, note, e-mail or calendar entry, in intranet or internet, person- or text-related. The software solution finds all required information, regardless of source, for its users. Get a comprehensive overview of corporate knowledge in seconds without redundancy or loss of data.
Navigate to http://www.mindbreeze.com/ to read more.
Philip West, July 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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