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).
The Governance Air Craft Carrier: Too Big to Sail?
August 31, 2011
In a few days, I disappear into the wilds of a far off land. In theory, a government will pay me, but I am increasingly doubtful of promises made from 3,000 miles from Harrod’s Creek. As part of the run up to my departure, we held a mini webinar/consultation on Tuesday, August 30, 2011, with a particularly energetic company engaged in “governance.” (SharePoint Semantics has dozens of articles about governance. One example is “A Useful Guide to SharePoint Success from Symon Garfield”. The format of the call was basic. The people on the call asked me questions, and I provided only the perspective of three score years and as many online failures can provide. (I will mention SharePoint but my observations apply to other systems as well; for instance, Documentum, Interwoven, FileNet, etc.)
What I want to do in this short write up is identify a subject that we did not tackle directly in that call, which concerned a government project. However, after the call, I realized that what I call an “air craft carrier” problem was germane to the discussion of automated indexing and entity extraction. An air craft carrier today is a modular construction. The idea is that the flight deck is made by one or more vendors, moved to the assembly point, and bolted down. The same approach is taken with cabins, electronics, and weapon systems.
The basic naval engineering best practice is to figure out how to get the design nailed down. Who wants to have propeller assemblies arrive that do not match the hull clearance specification?
What’s an air craft carrier problem? An air craft carrier is a big ship. It is, according to my colleague Rick Fiust, a former naval officer, a “really big ship.” Unlike a rich person’s yacht or a cruise ship, an air craft carrier does more than surprise with its size. Air craft carriers pack a wallop. In grade school I remember learning the phrase “gun boat diplomacy.” The idea was that a couple of gun boats sends a powerful message.
What every content centric system aspires to be. Some information technology professionals will tell their bosses or clients, “You have a state of the art search and content processing system. Everything works.” Unlikely in my experience.
Governance or what I like to think of as “editorial policy” is an air craft carrier. The connotation of governance is broad, involves many different functions, and sends a powerful message. The problem is that when content in an organization becomes unmanageable, the air craft carrier runs aground and the crew is not exactly sure what to to about the problem.
Consider this real life example. A well meaning information technology manager installs SharePoint to allow the professionals in marketing to share their documents, price lists, and snippets from a Web site. Then the company acquires another firm, which runs SharePoint as well as a handful of enterprise applications. On the surface, the situation looks straight forward. However, the task of getting the two organizations’ systems to work smoothly is a bit tricky. There are the standard challenges of permissions and access as well as somewhat more exotic ones of coping with intra-unit indexing and index refreshes. Then a third company is acquired, and it runs SharePoint. Unlike the first two installations which were “by the book”, the third company’s information technology unit used SharePoint as a blank canvas and created specialized features and services, plugged in third party components, and some home grown code.
Now the content issue arises. What content is available, when, to whom, and under what circumstances. Because the SharePoint installation was built in separate modules over time, will these fit together? Nope. There was no equivalent of the naval engineering best practice.
Governance, in my opinion, is the buzz word slapped on content centric systems of which SharePoint is but one example. The same governance problem surfaces when multiple content centric systems are joined.
Will after the fact governance solve the content problems in a SharePoint or other content centric environment? In my experience, the answer is, “Unlikely.” There are four reasons:
Cost. Reworking three systems built on the same platform should be trivial. The work is difficult and in some situations, scrapping the original three systems and starting over may be a more cost effective solution. Who knows what interdependencies lurk within the three systems which are supposed to work as one? Open ended engineering projects are likely to encounter funding problems, and the systems must be used “as is” or fixed a problem at a time.
EasyAsk Right Choice for InkJet Superstore
August 29, 2011
Have you ever tried to find ink or toner for a not-so-new printer? The process can be confusing, and shoppers are unlikely to feel warm and fuzzy about any ink seller whose Web site only adds to the frustration.
One purveyor of ink and toner made a wise choice when it picked EasyAsk’s eCommerce Edition. EasyAsk asserts, “NetSuite Customer InkJet Superstore Jets Past Competitors Using EasyAsk Natural Language E-Commerce Search Software for SaaS.” The press release states,
Using EasyAsk eCommerce edition, InkJet Superstore has dramatically simplified finding the right printer cartridges and accessories, providing the easiest online experience for customers, increasing online orders and revenue. The news release said: “InkjetSuperstore.com sells toner and ink cartridges for virtually every make and model of printer, copier, and fax machine, with over 6,000 items. InkJet Superstore’s vision is clearly articulated on the company website: ‘To be the best, the easiest, the cheapest and friendliest place to buy printer accessories.’ To back this up, InkJet Superstore offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee, which includes paying for return shipping cost.
Source: http://www.inkjetsuperstore.com, powered by EasyAsk NLP technology
EasyAsk is helping InkJet Superstore deliver on its promises. Since the business implemented the solution, the site has had 80% fewer “no results” returns; increased order conversion rates by six percent; and decreased its phone calls and live chat requests, indicating that customers are more easily finding what they need.
The solution didn’t stop there. With their its rapidly expanding, Inkjet Superstore is taking advantage of the EasyAsk’s auto-sync feature to assimilate new products into the Web site. Furthermore, rich analytics mine customer search terms for items that are in demand, suggesting potential new products.
Quite an August 2011: Search and More in Transition
August 25, 2011
I have been watching the computer earthquakes for decades. I have survived the mainframe to mini revolution, the mini to desktop, and the other seismic events which transform the hills and plains of the technology world. My view on the summer 2011 season is easy to sum up: A New Era is upon us.
Major disruption.Source: http://www.theberkeleygraduate.com/2009/10/preparing-for-an-earthquake/
First, consider search. Of the blue chip enterprise search vendors I analyzed in the first edition of the Enterprise Search Report in 2004, there is one independent firm, Endeca. Autonomy, Convera, Exalead, and Fast Search are either out of business (Convera) or absorbed into much larger firms and likely to be integrated into other enterprise solutions. Of this group, only Endeca remains independent, which begs the question, “Why?” Of the 2004 big five—Autonomy, Convera, Endeca, Exalead, and Fast Search & Transfer—only Exalead retains its technical leadership under the Dassault management system. (What then are the management systems of Hewlett Packard and Microsoft? I will let you answer the question.)
The search landscape is now chock-a-block with firms who will have an opportunity to expand their reach and market impact. For a listing of some firms I track, navigate to Overflight. The question is, “Will in the present double dip environment will these promising companies have the money and time required to achieve the type of revenues associated with Autonomy, which was on track to break the $1.0 billion glass ceiling against which many search and content processing have pressed their noses?” On a call with an investment firm this week, I said when asked about a data management vendor’s roll out of an enterprise search system, “Long shot.”
Second, what about Google? The disruptions triggered by Google in August are significant for several reasons. Google purchased Motorola Mobility and acquired additional litigation and intellectual property. Along with the purchase comes a hardware business which seems to be capable of creating friction with some of the companies in the Android ecosystem. More important to me is that the purchase of Motorola Mobility makes clear that the Google of old is no more. The commitment to mobile means that search has to monetize, not deliver on point results. I know that most users find Google the go-to search engine. My concern is that without significant growth in ad revenues, the bets are significant. How does one generate money from traffic? Sell access to that traffic is my answer. Search and Google are now similar to HP. The companies must move forward.
Aggregation: A Brave New World?
August 24, 2011
As I’m typing this article on my computer, I must confess, I love pen and paper, the smell of a new book, the sound a newspaper makes when its pages are turned. Unfortunately, these physical things are slowly becoming extinct thanks to the internet. Though I stubbornly resist the allure of Kindle, I can see the writing on the wall, or the tablet.
The article How the Internet Has All But Destroyed the Market for Films, Music and Newspapers from the UK’s The Guardian, believes the impending death of physical newspapers, among other media outlets, is due to the lack of law governing and enforced on the internet. According to it, as long as information can be easily pirated and transmitted to others for free, those footing the bill for creating the movies, music and news will continue to see sharp declines in profits.
Image source: http://www.sreweb.com/weekend_emails/sept_10_2010/
To understand how the internet is killing the newspaper star, one must first understand why newspapers have worked so well for so long. It’s all about aggregation and curation. Aggregation is simply the gathering of ‘stuff’; in a newspaper’s case, that stuff is news stories, sports scores, horoscopes, classified ads, etc… Curation is the culling out of unnecessary ‘stuff’.
Newspapers have created brands for themselves because of their unique aggregating and curating. For hundreds of years if someone liked a column in a specific newspaper, they were forced to buy the entire paper to read the one column of interest. The newspaper hoped that the reader would also find the other articles interesting, but it didn’t really matter because the price of the newspaper was the same whether a reader liked one article or all of them.
Search Innovation: Do IR Thought Leaders Recycle Old Ideas?
August 17, 2011
We are fast approaching our 60th interview in the Search Wizards Speak series. In June 2011, we completed The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, which involved its own series of interviews with engineers, search system customers, chief executive officers, and pundits.
A Paucity of Insights or Fear?
For many years, I have been interviewing entrepreneurs, developers, and investors about information retrieval, content processing, and headache inducing technologies such as entity extraction and natural language processing.
My team of goslings here in Harrod’s Creek the industry leaders like Exalead and some of the more interesting newcomers such as SearchLion. Next week, we release an interview with a fast growing company with headquarters in Europe. Some vendors don’t want to talk; for example, Google and Microsoft. Microsoft was in but then the “expert” disappeared. With the churn at Microsoft, I am just sitting on the sidelines. Other vendors and experts want to talk but don’t want to commit their ideas to a digital interview in a context of scores of other experts’ commentary.
Here’s the trigger for this summary of my thoughts from August 15, 2011. I listened to a podcast this morning when I was walking my trusty technical advisor, Max the Boxer.
The on air personality was Adam Carolla. Program is available via iTunes or from the Adam Carolla Web site. The segment of the program which caught my attention was Mr. Carolla’s interview with author and columnist Ben Shapiro, a Harvard lawyer. Mr. Shapiro is the author of Primetime Propaganda: The Tue Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. The air was cool and Mr. Max was chasing squirrels, so I listened to Mr. Shapiro’s observations about how certain well placed individuals feel uncomfortable in their life roles. Mr. Carolla mentioned that he too had observed that some individuals wear their wealth and station in life awkwardly. (I remember reading in 2003 Why Smart Executives Fail, which advanced some similar arguments.)
What’s this have to do with Search Wizards Speak and the interviews I conducted for The New Landscape of Enterprise Search?
I realized that in the interviews I have conducted over the last 32 months, only a few individuals were completely confident in their answers to my now-standardized questions about “What are the major trends in search?” and “What product enhancements will you be introducing in the next release of your product?” In one go round, not only did the interview take nearly four months to complete, the interview subject deleted my standard introduction, deleted my general observations about the interview, and rearranged the content of the interview so that it suppressed any hint of a personal touch for the interview subject. That’s okay with me. The information was interesting and not available elsewhere, so I ran with it.
My Sharpiro’s and Mr. Carolla’s comments struck a nerve because in the search and content processing industry, I think the same type of uncertainty and discomfort exists. Because search is miles away from Wall Street or Hollywood, the experts like Mr. Shapiro ignore software, choosing to focus on high profile topics that cater to a broader audience.
Fuzzy Is Popular
Let’s assume for a moment that Mr. Shapiro’s podcast observation is accurate. What is causing experts in search to be fuzzy, waffling, and uncertain about search and retrieval? (Remember. I am talking about the sample of interviews I have conducted and published, not about forthcoming interviews.)
First, I think that most vendors of search and content processing systems are facing pressures that may be greater that press upon other technology companies. Search and content processing is one of those complex areas which most people dismiss as “been there, done that.” The preeminence of search as a core application has been losing the high ground over the last three or four years. In fact, based on the research we conducted for my new monograph The New Landscape of Search, the shift may be accelerating. Search appears to be more of a utility function. The most successful of the content processing vendors—Exalead, to take one example—embed search in broader, often higher value enterprise solutions. A company selling brute force indexing or a component to improve the indexing of entities is like to find its market becoming less top management level and more information technology staff level. I think this introduces uncertainty in how a search and content processing company can position and price its technology.
Thanks to the creative whiz at http://planetpov.com/2011/07/25/uncertainty-in-business-will-it-become-sustainable/
Second, the every day user of a free Web search system or a person doing customer support work in a big company expects a search box. The habit of banging two or three words into the search slot machine and getting out an information payoff is routine. Search and content processing vendors talk a great deal about improving productivity, but the reality is that most users don’t know if the information provided is right or wrong. Most just use what’s at the top of the results list. My hunch is that the increasing dissatisfaction with search is a warning signal that the brute force approach, although ubiquitous, is not working. The client, on the other hand, is okay with good enough. As a result, a vendor trying to explain how to improve a search box function has a long, expensive, and arduous sales process. The top dogs in search and content processing companies want results, but the folks selling the product are not sure what to say to close the deal and keep its options open with other prospects. Not surprisingly, when one reads the nearly 60 interviews, there is a note of sameness that threads through the write ups. The companies that say something different—Autonomy or Exalead, for example—stand out. Many of the others seem quite alike. I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.
The App Approach: A Dead End?
August 11, 2011
From the amazing statements department. Flash. Venture Beat’s “Nokia Exec: Android and iPhone Focus on the App Is “Outdated” caught my attention. For this write up, let;s assume the fellow is dead wrong. I am okay with headlines written for Bing and Google indexing subsystems. I am also okay with wild and crazy statements from cash strapped azure chip consultants, search vendors worried about making the next payment on the CEO’s company car, and unemployed English majors explaining that they are really social media experts. In an economic depression, words are worthless. When one has nothing to lose, is the approach “Go for broke?’
The assertion reported by Venture Beat’s Mobile Beat online publication was quite interesting. First, Nokia is not hitting any financial home runs. Say what you will about Apple, the outfit has a nifty balance sheet. Even the Google which is a giant ad system is able to “give away” a mobile operating system and make big waves. One example is the factoid that hundreds of thousands of Android-based devices are sold every time I check the weather in Harrod’s Creek.
A happy quack to http://zekjevets.blogspot.com/2010/02/alternative-racism.html
Here’s the statement that snagged me. (This is a longer quote than we normally use, but I want to get the context right. Please, navigate to the Venture Beat original for the full story. Also, note that I have put in bold face the items upon which I wish to comment.)
Nokia’s future phones will merge the latest Microsoft Windows Phone software based on the Mango update (which Weber said has had great reviews) with Nokia’s hardware, which he said boasts reliability and phone call quality. Weber cited state-of-the-art imaging technology and battery performance as areas Nokia phones would excel in. Weber also said Nokia may beat competitors on pricing, thanks to the company’s significant global reach, which gives it economies of scale. Moreover, Weber said the company will launch its superphone portfolio with a focus on U.S. market, because he said winning in the U.S. market is what it takes to win globally. He also confirmed that Nokia will back the launch with the company’s largest marketing effort to date, though wouldn’t go into specifics. Weber called Android and the iOS phone platforms “outdated.” While Apple’s iPhone, and its underlying iOS operating system, set the standard for a modern user interface with “pinch and zoom,” Weber conceded, it also forces people to download multiple applications which they then have to navigate between. There’s a lot of touching involved as you press icons or buttons to activate application features. Android essentially “commoditized” this approach, Weber said.
Whew. Let me do an addled goose style run down.
- Reliability and call quality. In my experience the phone is only part of the reliability and call quality equation. There are networks involved. I have worked throughout the world and reliability and call quality has more to do with where I am than the handset. In the arctic circle my Treo 650 worked like a champ. In the hollow near my pond, I can’t get a coherent squawk from my BlackBerry. So how’s Nokia going to fix this? Nokia can’t. Baloney.
- Imaging and battery performance. Whoa, horsey. Putting a better camera in a phone is a question of economics and technical tradeoffs. The battery issue is a big deal. As crazy as Research in Motion’s present management set up is, the company does have good battery technology as does Apple. Nokia? Better get that pony aimed at the battery corral is my advice.
Google vs. Facebook: Peewee League or World Cup of Social
August 10, 2011
Search vs. Social Media. Google vs. Facebook. The two sides seem to be locked in what some pundits and “real” experts see as an epic battle for ultimate Internet supremacy. Slow news day? Brilliant insight?
Both sides have significantly changed the online landscape. With Google’s new Google + social network, the two are now fighting over essentially the same territory, and ultimately the same advertising revenue. The Guardian reports in, “Google and Facebook Get Personal in Battle for Social Networking Rewards.” We learned:
Ultimately the real battle is over cold, hard cash. Google made 97% of its revenues, or $32.3bn, in the past 12 months from advertising. eMarketer, meanwhile estimates that Facebook’s largely ad-generated revenues will grow from $0.74bn in 2009 to $5.74bn in 2012 – yet the site has hardly begun rolling out truly personalized, targeted advertising. If there is any of Google’s lunch to be eaten, it is here.
Google has admitted to being behind the curve in the social media game. Facebook is deeply entrenched and has momentum on its side. Google maintains that at its heart it is still a search company, but Google + can add another level to the personalization and identity of the searcher. They are not trying to recreate exactly what Facebook has done, and that’s exactly the problem.
World Cup?
We noted this passage:
Though Google+ is an intelligent attempt at a social networking tool, it seems a typical Google product in that it is brilliantly, heavily engineered but lacks the human focus required for a social network – the fuel that has propelled Facebook to 750 million users.
Arnold, Google, and Innovation: The Google Labs Event
July 31, 2011
Imagine my surprise when a reader sent me a link to “The End of an Era for Google Labs—Innovation Now Via Acquisition and Pontification.” I submitted an analytic write up which ran as a news item. I don’t do news, but Information Today did me the honor of handling my commentary as “real” news. A happy honk to the editor for this decision.
The point of my write up was that Google asserts that innovation will come from product teams. Maybe? I think product teams add features. Some features require innovation, but in my research, the big ideas such as Google becoming the Internet come from the pre-2007 era at Google. Since that wonderful year, Google has been implementing and buying companies to get innovation. In some cases, Google acquires people who developed a company and then join Google to follow their research path. I document a couple of these individuals with companies in their past cases in my monograph Google Version 2.0, which is still relevant and available from this link.
In my Information Today “news” break, I asserted:
… consider that less than 3 weeks after the Google+ tsunami rolled over the lucky invited beta testers, Google purchased Fridge, a start up with technology that allows a Google+ user to create private groups. A few days later, Google bought PittPatt, a start up with facial recognition software. Keep in mind that Google has its own facial recognition technology and Schmidt cautioned governments about the use of such technology. The phrase I jotted down was “facial recognition is too creepy even for Google.” The quote appears in a May 18, 2011 article in The Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper. Creepy or not, Google is buying technology, presumably to add functionality to its lineup of products. I will have to check out Google+ to see if PittPatt features turn up in Picasa, the photo sharing program now integrated into Google+. (Google Labs generated some interesting patent applications such as US2010 0008547, “Method and System for Automated Annotation of Persons in Video Content.”)
I think the shift at Google is understandable and, in fact, almost inevitable.
Let me go back in time to the mid 1970s. I worked on a project which is long since forgotten. The companies which were the focus of the study have morphed in dramatic ways (GE) and some have just disappeared (RCA). My memory is not to sharp, but let me summarize what I recall from a research project conducted almost 40 years ago.
A Historical Note about Innovation
In the late 1970s, I worked at a major consulting firm. In 1974, only McKinsey & Co., Bain, and Boston Consulting Group challenged my employer for the top spot of the experts-for-hire totem pole. One of my most challenging projects was working on a global study of innovation. The research, commissioned by a Fortune 50 company, was to answer what looks like a simple question, “How do technology leaders innovate?”
I remember the three key findings of that work completed almost 40 years ago. Our sample was skewed to what the client called “big innovation spenders”, so the investments in innovation were hefty when fully loaded with:
Belgium and Google: A Messy Waffle
July 18, 2011
I saw this headline: “Belgian Newspapers Claim Retaliation By Google After Copyright Victory” and I was nervous clicking on the link. SEO news services make me nervous. The idea of any “retaliation” story makes me think of long lists of words on a watch list somewhere.
I clicked on the link, and the story seemed okay, just a bit thin on substantive details. Quoting the Associated Press is in and of itself is reason for concern.
Here’s the main idea:
Publishers in Belgium did not want their content indexed by Google. (That strikes me as less than informed, but forget the knowledge value angle.) So publishers get the fluid legal system to notify the Google. Shortly thereafter, some Belgium publishers note that their content is tough to find at the top of a Google results list. Bottomline line: Some folks believe Google is jiggling the results to make some Belgian content familiar with the tedium of clicking through lots of pages to find the desired hit.
My view is that accusations are definitely good for “real” news outfits like the publisher of the retaliation story. I also think that considerable care must be taken before yip yapping about why a particular results list does not show what one wants, expects, believes, or hopes will appear.
Google has lots of people working on the search system. I once believed that these teams were coordinated and working like a well oiled robot arm assembling nuclear fuel rods. Now I know that the method is more like “get it working”. Good enough is going to earn a search wizard an A from the Google system.
Messy waffles. Image source: http://eatbakelove-todayistheday.blogspot.com/2011/06/weekend-warrior.html
If there is a difference between publishers’ expectations and what is in a particular result list, I suggest several things:
First, get a trained and expert online searcher to run queries in a methodical manner to verify what is and what is not “findable.” Keep in mind that 99.9 percent of the people who claim to be search experts are not. If you don’t believe me, give Ulla de Stricker a buzz. You can also try Anne Mintz, former director of the Forbes Magazine information center. You can also ping Marydee Ojala, editor of online. Folks, trust me. These individuals are certifiable online search experts and can get the information needed to put some data behind the hot air. Data needed.
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