Exclusive Interview: David B. Camarata, IKANOW
April 9, 2012
Analytics, data mining, and text mining are hot. Open source software is hot. What happens when the two are combined? One answer is, “IKANOW.”
IKANOW, founded in 2010, is focused on the intersection of analytics and big data. The company’s motto is “The power to act.” The company’s approach combines cutting-edge analytic methods and open source technology to produce innovative ways to distill meaning from digital data and information. Unlike traditional key word search, IKANOW delivers solutions which reveal insights.
We learned about IKANOW when we were ramping up our new open source analytics information service “TheTrendPoint.com”. As we were sifting through the companies offering open source analytics, IKANOW stood out.
David B. Camarata told me:
IKANOW was created from observations and lessons learned made by my colleagues and I after working hand in hand with Department of Defense and intelligence community over the past decades. What we learned from hundreds of projects was that new ways of thought were required to solve the problems and challenges, which were coming with increasing speed and from many different angles. After a very successful and rewarding career in building tightly woven integrated systems, I became aware of the value of next-generation analytics. I wanted to build a company around the core idea of “the power to act.” I don’t want to spend hours trying to think up key words that will unlock the information in a system. I don’t know what information is in the system so how can I know what there. That’s when I hit on the idea of “I can know.”
With university computer science departments and entrepreneurs around the world jumping into the analytics market, the question becomes, “What sets IKANOW apart?” Mr. Camarata said:
We have some breakthroughs, but I want to be careful in how I explain our approach. Our research activities have been focused on creating simple and scalable ways to harvest, unify and expose unstructured and structured information. The breakthroughs we have achieved yield what we call “enhanced reasoning.” The core of our approach pivots on our methods for addressing the three legs of the decision stool. There is the platform which must be scalable, extensible, and performant. Next, we have to be able to harvest and enrich data and information. In their raw form, data lacks context and may be meaningless. A range of numerical methods and semantic techniques are required to figure out what significance something has. Finally, we created a robust application programming interface so developers and our licensees can tap into the platform. At the heart of the technology is a flexible semi-structured NoSQL data model that can be easily tailored to specific business problems.
You can read the complete, exclusive interview at the ArnoldIT.com Web site in its Search Wizards Speak feature. The interview with Mr. Camarata is now available. For more information about IKANOW, navigate to the company’s Web site at www.ikanow.com. My view is that IKANOW is definitely “performant.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Summer of Big Deals
September 1, 2011
Will These Blockbusters Affect Business Intelligence?
The summer has been a hot one, not in terms of temperature, but when measured on the acquisition thermometer. First, Oracle the sprawling database and enterprise applications company bought InQuira. Then, Google took one third of its cash and the equivalent of two years’ profit and bought Motorola Mobility. And Hewlett Packard, one of the icon’s of the Silicon Valley way, spent $10 billion on its surprise purchase of Autonomy plc.
Business intelligence, intellectual property, and information management turned up the heat for investors and those tracking active market sectors. The market interest is high and many think these deals are likely to sustain their energy. But I don’t see it that way. I think the deals are more like dumping charcoal starter on charcoal briquettes: Very dramatic at ignition but certain to cool and fade into the fabric of day-to-day activity.
Starting a charcoal fire can produce some initial pyrotechnics. These fade quickly.
As the founder of Digital Reasoning, a company focused on delivering the next-generation solution-based on entity oriented analytics, I see these deals from the perspective of working with customers to solve big data analytics challenges. First, let me give you my view of information management and traditional business analytics and then outline where I think the technology and the market are going.
Business intelligence in general and analytics particular are now verbal noise. I know that most of the professionals with whom I speak interpret the phrase “business intelligence” in terms of their own experiences in getting information to make a decision. For some, business intelligence is a report and follow up telephone conversation with a human expert. Don’t get me wrong, consultants and advisors often do great work, but my point is that the phrase “business intelligence” is anchored in a method of information analysis rooted in human behavior unchanged since our ancestors sat around the camp fire roasting meat on sticks.,
The word analytics is equally difficult to explain. For many of our clients, analytics means SAS or SPSS (both the bread and butter of traditional statistics courses and business analysts from banking to warehouse management).
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