Oracle and SAP: The Milagro Database War
May 3, 2012
I received an email inducing me to read “Hana and Exalytics: SAP’s Hype Versus Oracle’s FUD.” The write up takes a serious or at least semi serious at Milagro database war. If you are not familiar with the Milagro Beanfield War, you might find the write up a loose allegory of what’s happening in traditional data management companies and the NoSQL farmers.
The Information Week write up does not talk about the real story, however. What we get is two giants of traditional enterprise software squabbling over which traditional data management system is most likely to keep the Fortune 1000, government agencies, and big educational institutions within the traditional enterprise software corral.
With regard to Oracle, the write up asserts:
Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Safra Catz have missed few opportunities to discredit Hana in recent months. But executive VP Thomas Kurian took the slams a level deeper on Friday with a one-hour Webinar clearly intended to sow seeds of fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of would-be Hana customers. The session was billed as an Exalytics seminar, but each point set up a contrast with Hana. Kurian claimed, among other things, that SAP’s product costs five times to 50 times more than Exalytics and that it doesn’t support SQL (relational) or MDX (multidimensional) query languages, requiring apps to be rewritten to run on the new database.
The Information Week write up reports:
SAP’s hype about these apps is getting a little ahead of deployed market reality. Both Hana and Oracle Exalytics can point to dramatic before-and-after differences in query speeds. (Even SAP grants that Exalytics can accelerate queries.) SAP says the real payoff from Hana will be in transforming business processes, not just accelerating queries. But we haven’t seen enough solid, real-world customer examples documenting transformed business competitiveness.
The Open Source Search Ostriches
April 30, 2012
ArnoldIT, located in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, has spotted a new species of search, content processing, and text mining vendor: The Scrutans Struthioniformes. Believed to be related to the ratites, this new subspecies is known to be indifferent to ignorant of the predator from the open source jungle.
The proprietary search vendor, Scrutans Struthioniformes, ignores the impact of open source search and information retrieval systems.
ArnoldIT has completed a couple of exploratory expeditions thought he wilds of open source search, clustering, and related disciplines. Sparked by the bimonthly feature on open source search which is currently appearing in Information Today’s Online Magazine, the discovery of the Scrutans Struthioniformes was unexpected.
For almost 50 years, information retrieval meant proprietary systems built upon innovations by academic researchers. When the influence was from the number crunching of the Cornell school or the semantic shenanigans from Stanford, search and retrieval translated to:
- Expensive to license, install, optimize, and maintain systems
- Licensing restrictions which prevented client-specific tailoring and fast cycle problem remediation or feature addition
- High levels of user dissatisfaction from the CFO’s office (the lady who pays the bills) to the user in the sales department (the person who has to find out what happened to a particular customer’s order).
What’s changed, according to ArnoldIT, is that open source options are readily available. Smart outfits like IBM killed off in house, brute force search efforts and embraced the open source Lucene/Solr technology. IBM is a proprietary outfit, but the use of Lucene/Solr allowed more effort to be put into value-adding projects such as the “wrappers” which make Watson a game show winner. IBM has also used its billions to purchase proprietary vendors to deliver “additional value.” The purchase of Vivisimo is a good example of a quick way to get clustering, deduping, and federating functions to bolt on the open source plumbing. IBM may disagree, but we have our views.
Other vendors have built businesses on open source search. One example is the emergence of Lucid Imagination and its Lucid Works Enterpriser 2.0 solution. Licensees get speedy search and retrieval, a staff able to answer questions, and a the rapid cycle innovation of the open source Lucene/Solr software.
Clever Amazon is a “sort of” open outfit. On one hand, the company uses open source software to make the Amazon cloud work. However,the CloudSearch solution is based on A9. Amazon, however, provides “sort of” open application programming interfaces. Open source as a business angle is part of the CloudSearch play along with making life easy for developers to deliver “good enough” search.
The Basho Riak Search angle is a variation. Riak Search is proprietary but Basho has made it open source. (A free profile of Basho is available by registering at TheSeed2020, an ArnoldIT content delivery Web site.) Good citizens and good marketing. For a company with a problem which requires Basho data management, the Riak Search solution is available, and it is open source.
There are other variations as well, and these are explained in the ArnoldIT briefing about open source search, its opportunities, and its challenges. Unlike the technology payloads delivered by blogs, the ArnoldIT briefing focuses on the business angle of open source search, and the research has delivered some shockers; for example:
- In a sample of 35 proprietary search vendors, 25 assert that their systems are in some way open source. Good marketing, better technology, or great hyperbole?
- In a sample of 100 search vendors, two thirds of those pinged by ArnoldIT know about or are on top of open source search. Quite an assertion as the Lucid Imagination Lucene Revolution approaches with dozens of case studies that reveal large companies’ willingness to shift from proprietary solutions to open source search. Are most vendors of proprietary search systems ignoring reality? Sure looks like some are confident the search world tomorrow will look the way it did in 2003.
- Hosted search is gaining traction in some specific niches. Two of these niches have long been dominated by proprietary systems. More surprising in the fact that the greatest inroads are being made among the Fortune 1000. That’s the market where money often is for enterprise software vendors.
Will vendors of proprietary search and retrieval systems be able to keep their investors and stakeholders happy as open source becomes a greater force in 2013? The briefing considers the scenario when firms pour more funds into open source search and content processing start ups. If this happens, life becomes more difficult from “on the bubble” vendors of taxonomy, clustering, search, and basic information retrieval systems.
Net net: Another search revolution is brewing. Is your proprietary search vendor a Scrutans Struthioniformes? A better question: Are you? For more information about the ArnoldIT open source search briefing, write seaky2000 at yahoo dot com for options and fees. ArnoldIT may create an open source search ostrich T shirt. Stay tuned. Max and Tess are working on this project now.
Stephen E Arnold, April 30, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
IBM Buys Vivisimo Allegedly for Its Big Data Prowess
April 25, 2012
Big data. Wow. That’s an angle only a public relations person with a degree in 20th century American literature could craft. Vivisimo is many things, but a big data system? News to me for sure.
IBM has been a strong consumer and integrator of open source search solutions. Watson, the game show winner, used Lucene with IBM wrapper software to keep the folks in Jeopardy post production on their toes.
A screen shot of the Vivisimo Velocity system displaying search results for the RAND organization. Notice the folders in the left hand panel. The interface reveals Vivisimo’s roots in traditional search and retrieval. The federating function operates behind the scenes. The newest versions of Velocity permit a user to annotate a search hit so the system will boost it in subsequent queries if the comment is positive. A negative rating on a result suppresses that result.
I learned that IBM allegedly purchased Vivisimo, a company which I have covered in my various monographs about search and content processing. Forbes ran a story which was at odds with my understanding of what the Vivisimo technology actually does. Here’s the Forbes’ title: “IBM To Buy Vivisimo; Expands Bet On Big Data Analytics.” Notice the phrase “big data analytics.”
Why do I point out the “big data” buzzword? The reasons include:
- Vivisimo has a clustering method which takes search results and groups them, placing similar results identified by the method in “folders”
- Vivisimo has a federating method which, like Bright Planet’s and Deep Web Technologies’, takes a user’s query and sends the query to two or more indexing systems, retrieves the results, and displays them to the user
- Vivisimo has a clever de-duplication method which makes the results list present one item. This is important when one encounters a news story which appears on multiple Web sites.
According to the write up in Forbes, a “real” news outfit:
IBM this morning said it has agreed to acquire Vivisimo, a Pittsburgh-based provider of big data access and analysis tools.
Okay, but in Beyond Search we have documented that Vivisimo followed this trajectory in its sales and marketing efforts since the company opened for business in 2000. In fact, the Wikipedia write up about Vivisimo says this:
Vivisimo is a privately held enterprise search software company in Pittsburgh that develops and sells software products to improve search on the web and in enterprises. The focus of Vivisimo’s research thus far has been the concept of clustering search results based on topic: for example, dividing the results of a search for “cell” into groups like “biology,” “battery,” and “prison.” This process allows users to intuitively narrow their search results to a particular category or browse through related fields of information, and seeks to avoid the “overload” problem of sorting through too many results.
Conversation? I Think Not
April 23, 2012
In my dead tree edition of the New York Times, I read “The Flight from Conversation” by an MIT professor and author. The newspaper put the story on page one of the Sunday Review section with a jump to pages six and seven. The online version was visible to me this morning (April 23, 2012) as “Opinion. The Flight from Conversation.” I am never sure which New York Times story will be available to whom or for how long, so you are on your own if you get a 404 or a begging for dollars screen.
What I know is that “conversation” is idealized in today’s thumb typing world. Defining conversation is useful. Holding a conversation is getting to be an exercise in human interaction archaeology.
Does this Thomas Kinkade painting represent a real place? Does discourse today provide “conversation” or an idealized notion of give and take among and between individuals?
Straight away let me say that I found the write up interesting because it was chock full of “hooks”. I had a boss at Booz, Allen & Hamilton in the days when the firm had a pretty good reputation for management and technology consultant. This particular manager collected “hook phrases,” which he hoped to use in his reports, speeches, and his various writings. On my first pass through the Flight article I noted these keepers:
- Devices change what we do and who we are
- Turn desks into cockpits
- The Goldilocks [sic] effect
- Put ourselves on cable news
- Automatic listeners
- Confuse conversation with connection
- Illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship
- New devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved
- Device free zones
- Casual Fridays and conversational Thursdays
Quite a payload. Upon reviewing my collection of hooks from the essay, the author should be working for CNN or CNBC.
The key point of the write up is that instead of engaging in conversation, the thumb typing generation likes being with people and being online. I agree. The notion of checking email in the middle of a face to face conversation with a person at KY Fry or lunch chatter at a trade show often warrants some digital supplements. I get paid to attend to trade shows, but not even money can cut through the marketing blather, the pitches from consultants looking for work, and speakers who are nervous about giving a talk which will avoid controversy, make a good impression, and sell someone something.
My concern is not about the essay. The anomie of modern society has been an idea kicking around since I experienced college lectures from razor sharp academics. I started thinking about the assumptions on which the essay rests. For example, how easy is it at MIT or any big name university focused on funding, start ups, and getting faculty to function as magnets which pull cash for chairs to get faculty to make themselves available for students who want a conversation? Are those office hours real or the academic equivalent of vaporware?
New Open Source Search Information Service Available
April 16, 2012
Open source search was not a viable option for the enterprise in 2003 when ArnoldIT started work on the first Enterprise Search Report. Stephen E. Arnold wrote two more editions before he decided that proprietary search solutions were becoming “look alikes.” In the ArnoldIT 2011 study, The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, Stephen E Arnold and his editorial team decided not to cover open source search solutions because the sector was moving rapidly and no large players had emerged. Now almost a year after the New Landscape of Enterprise Search, the pace of innovation has increased significantly and there are some significant commercial open source search ventures in the US and elsewhere.
The ArnoldIT editorial team, which consists of librarians and technologists, recommended that we begin the task of identifying important articles to determine if there were sufficient mass to warrant a Beyond Search type of publication focused on open source search. We concluded that there was an increasing flow of information about open source search. Therefore, we want to share this information with others who have an interest in what is shaping up to be a disruptive force in information retrieval.
We want to help document that there is a new approach to enterprise search. The solutions involve the cloud, toolkits, and ready-to-run services available with a mouse click. The vendors pushing forward range from companies which have an established profile in the business community; for instance, IBM and Lucid Imagination. There are some open source search solutions which are not widely known in certain organizations; Xapian and Summa Summix come to mind. In between there are dozens of open source search, content processing, and hybrid services.
ArnoldIT recently completed a study of open source search option. After finishing our research for a client, we decided to move forward on a new information service. OpenSearchNews.com will discuss big data search solutions, including Amazon’s CloudSearch service, Basho Riak, and Constellio. If you are not familiar with these solutions and have an interest in search, you will want to check out OpenSearchNews.com.
The new microsite, now publicly available, publishes Monday through Friday and provides critical commentary, information about products, and highlights additional sources about open source search. The information service will report about the companies, trends, and products which offer an alternative to the seven figure solutions from proprietary enterprise search solutions. The approach of the service will be similar to that taken by researchers who want information that provides essential facts and links to high-value sources of information. The service will provide up-to-date news and analysis about the dynamic market for open source search and will publish Monday to Friday at www.opensearchnews.com. Additional information about the new information service is available on the site’s About page. Keep in mind that we don’t do “real” news. We have more in common with researchers and analysts than those who work for organizations embracing the tenets of Mr. Murdoch.
Recent stories include:
- Enterprise Adoption of Solr Lucene Rises
- In the Future, Enterprise Search Will Be a Service
- Lucid Works 2.0 Attracts Enterprise Suitors
Emily Aldridge, the editor of the publication, is an MLS and expert searcher who demonstrated exceptional capabilities in tracking down information about products and projects with names like Hounder, Oxyus, and Piscator.
Emily Aldridge, editor of the new information service, said:
“Open source search has become a fast-growing segment of the enterprise search and big data markets. The number of companies competing in this segment is growing. Large commercial enterprises are embracing open source and providing useful software to anyone who wants to use it. Two good examples are the contributions of Lucid Imagination and LinkedIn. The Danish government has supported an open source search initiative which provides search features for libraries looking to provide a patron with a single search box for a range of content in different collections.”
The information service will cover cloud solutions, open source search appliances, and mention commercial services which have open source software under the glossy exteriors of products and services from Amazon and IBM. We will also cover related subjects such as proprietary cloud search services. Comments will be accepted, and like other ArnoldIT information services we hope to combine useful information with some pointed observations.
Like Beyond Search, we will roll out new features and functions over time. We plan to use Google’s AdSense to help offset the cost of producing the service. If you want to learn more about the publication, contact us at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Don C. Anderson, Senior Engineer, ArnoldIT, April 16, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Open Source Analytics Information Service Now Available
April 9, 2012
ArnoldIT has rolled out The Trend Point information service. Published Monday through Friday, the information services focuses on the intersection of open source software and next-generation analytics. The approach will be for the editors and researchers to identify high-value source documents and then encapsulate these documents into easily-digested articles and stories. In addition, critical commentary, supplementary links, and important facts from the source document are provided. Unlike a news aggregation service run by automated agents, librarians and researchers use the ArnoldIT Overflight tools to track companies, concepts, and products. The combination of human-intermediated research with Overflight provide an executive or business professional with a quick, easy, and free way to keep track of important developments in open source analytics. There is no charge for the service.
Stories include:
- White House Orders Big Data Solutions
- Public and Private Sectors Combine for Big Savings
- Analytic Revolution Looks Different from 90s Dotcom Boom
According to the publisher, Stephen E Arnold:
We believe that commercial abstracting and indexing services have become untenable for the busy professional. We have combined traditional indexing, literature reviews, and critical commentary which help reduce the time required to pinpoint the meaningful information in this exploding open source analytics field.
Our business model is to provide high value information without a fee. Individuals, law firms, and private equity firms wanting additional information about the people, companies, and products we cover are free to contact us. Like other professional services’ firms, we rely on motivated individuals with an information need to tap into our full-scale, in-depth research.
What sets TheTrendPoint and other ArnoldIT.com information services apart is that its approach is similar to that used by commercial information services such as Medline and Disclosure, two information services designed to make reference services more useful.
At this time, TheTrendPoint.com is designed to complement the finding services which ArnoldIT.com publishes. ArnoldIT.com is one of the leading sources of information on subjects ranging from search and content processing to next-generation intelligence systems.
New content is added to the service Monday to Friday. For more information about the service, contact the publisher at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Kenneth Toth, April 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Netflix of Magazines and How Usage Will Really Work
April 5, 2012
I read “Finally, a Reason to Read Magazines on a Tablet.” The idea seems like a quite fresh one. A group of publishers have teamed up to pool high-value content. Users can buy the content. The idea is that aggregation of full text and a flat fee of $10 or $15 per month will generate revenue. I have not been privy to the discussions, but I have a hunch that the notion of “big money” and possibly the idea of “saving the magazine business” may have crossed the minds of the folks who came up with this 21st century idea. You can read the AllThingsD article and get the nitty gritty.
I want to focus on a fact I learned in my years of working with content in online form. Some of these ideas will strike most of the people under the age of 40 as silly, but the comments below are based on real life experience with commercial information products delivered in digital form via electronic media. I invite comments, but I want to capture the basics before I zoom past this “revolutionary” idea. I have pulled some ideas from my confidential report, “The Physics of Information,” prepared for a government agency a number of years ago. (Some related content is available when you search Beyond Search for “mysteries of online”; for example, Mysteries of Online 3: Free versus Fee Information.”)
The collision of reality and for-fee, high value information services spawns a large number of unanticipated costs. Revenue is usually inadequate to cover spikes, pay overhead, invest in additional development, and expand the user base. Unlike print magazines, digital content is slippery and tough to make pay in the way a successful magazine did in 1975.
First, in any aggregation of electronic content, there will be a variant of the 80-20 rule. In the digital world, four to seven percent of the available content attracts attention. If you have a back file of 100,000 stories and a flow of five new stories a day, the most recent content attracts the majority of the clicks. The “long tail” is an interesting concept, but in the world of paying for digital information, the fresh content and the most recent content has value. Older content for the majority of those seeking information is “nice to have” and will be rarely if ever clicked upon for a fee. As a result, when I am asked, “Do we build a back file of our high value content?”, my answer is, “No.” The money comes from the now content. Back file content unless easily automated or very cheap to acquire is not worth the hassle. Better to put the resources into the now content.
Woola Economics for Social Media
April 2, 2012
I admire some azure chip consultants. Now I understand that hiring of middle school teachers and home economics majors have fallen on hard times. Even people with juco degrees in information technology are struggling to find purchase on today’s economic ice hills. Enter Woola economics: fun, fanciful, and better than a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken doing inventory.
It stands to reason that the more motivated college grads and the progeny of helicopter parents would turn to mathematical pursuits. A good example is the story in Virtual Strategy, a heck of a title, but I don’t know what virtual strategy has to do with paying for petrol or retiring one of those pesky education loans. The story “Social Media Advertising Revenue to Show Steep Growth, Reaching $25 Billion by 2015 and $114 Billion by 2020” caught my attention.
Those are decent numbers, particularly the $114 billion. Here’s the best part in my opinion:
Further the Worldwide Social Media revenue is forecast for consistent growth with 2012 revenue totaling $14.9Bn, and the market is projected to reach $29.1Bn in 2014, $58.1Bn in 2016, will touch magical mark of $100Bn towards early part of 2018 and by the end of 2020 it will grow substantially closing at around $233bn.
Note the $233 billion.
Let’s assume that this estimate is accurate, give or take a few billion. Among the azure chip crowd involved in virtual strategy, what’s the risk?
Consider the Google. Replete with mathematicians and stats savvy, socially adjusted wizards, Google would look at these numbers and ask, “What can we do to get as much of this money as possible?? The answers to this question have in our exercise in virtual strategy concluded that Google must dominate social media. We can see the outcome of this type of thinking in Google’s efforts in social media and making everything from colanders to clicking on a Web page a social experience.
The problem, of course, is that social media has some established outfits like Facebook. There are quasi social operations which seem to appeal to specific demographics like Pinterest. And there are giants like Microsoft who want to convert making a phone call into a sharing opportunity.
Are these companies really social? Nah, these outfits are trying to make a buck. The social thing is the current hobby horse. The azure chip crowd knows that wild and crazy estimates are like charcoal starter fluid on dry wood shavings. The bigger the number, the more the frenzy.
Android and Alleged Fragmentation
March 22, 2012
I was in a third world health care facility this morning. As luck would have it, no fragmentation injuries ahead of me and twisted knickers. I kicked back in the delightful on deck circle for the emergency room checking out posts on my lousy notebook computer.
What did I spy? A headline about “fragmentation.” Well, in my line of work anything with the stem frag* warrants a second look. The headline? “Fragmentation B_mb Wounds Android in Developer War” is an interesting headline. One “watch word”, b_mb and one word on the fence, w-r.
The focus of the article was not on a military topic. The article describes how a mobile phone operating system has a negative impact because of the many different versions of the operating symptom. The collateral in this type of fragmentation affects developers. I see some impact upon civilian users.
There is no Google Android fragmentation. There are just different types of cookies. There is the parent cookie Google Android, and then the different children cookies. What’s the problem?
Here’s the passage I noted:
A new study conducted by IDC and mobile-developer platform and services company Appcelerator has determined that as Google’s open source Android operating system becomes more and more fragmented, fewer and fewer developers are putting it on their “must-code-for” list. “We’ve seen a steady erosion of interest in Android” among developers, Appcelerator’s principal mobile strategist Mike King told The Reg in a prebriefing before the study was released on Tuesday morning.
Okay, the sample size looks fine, but I don’t know anything about the representativeness of the sample. The fact that a single developer group was the source of the sample adds more questions about the validity of the survey.
So, let’s assume that the big study findings are okay. The hot platform for mobile developers to support is the walled garden inside the Apple Country Club & Bank. The losers living in the digital trailer courts are coders who are into Symbian, HP’s TouchPad, the BlackBerry Stone Age gizmos, and Windows Phone. It is early days for Windows 8, so these laggards may come on strong in the mobile developer race.
Another Poobah Insight: Marketing Is an Opportunity
March 21, 2012
Please, read the entire write up “Marketing Is the Next Big Money Sector in Technology.” When you read it, you will want to forget the following factoids:
- Google has been generating significant revenue from online ad services for about a decade
- Facebook is working to monetize with a range of marketing services every single one of the 800 million plus Facebook users
- Start ups in and around marketing are flourishing as the scrub brush search engine optimizers of yore bite the dust. A good example is the list of exhibitors at this conference.
The hook for the story is a quote from an azure chip consultancy. The idea is that as traditional marketing methods flame out, crash, and burn, digital marketing is the future. So the direct mail of the past will become spam email of the future I predict. Imagine.
Marketing will chew up an organization’s information technology budget. The way this works is that since “everyone” will have a mobile device, the digital pitches will know who, what, where, why, and how a prospect thinks, feels, and expects. The revolution is on its way, and there’s no one happier than a Madison Avenue executive who contemplates the riches from the intersection of technology, hapless prospects, and good old fashioned hucksterism. The future looks like a digital PT Barnum I predict.
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