Government High-Tech Investments: IN-Q-TEL
May 26, 2008
I received an email from a colleague new to the Federal sector. Her email included comments and links about US government funding of high technology companies. I was surprised because I assumed that most people knew of the IN-Q-TEL organization. As US government urls go, IN-Q-TEL’s will baffle some people. First, the hyphens throw off some folks. Then the group’s use of the Dot Org domain is another.
In a nutshell, IN-Q-TEL makes clear what it does and why:
IN-Q-TEL identifies, adapts, and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US intelligence community.
I’m not interested in whether IN-Q-TEL is doing a great job or a lousy job. I’m not concerned about its mission, its funding, or its management team.
What I find fascinating is the organization’s choice of companies in which to invest. I don’t know the budget range of IN-Q-TEL, but my sources tell me that the investments stick close to $1 million, sometimes more, sometimes less. You can read more about IN-Q-TEL at these links:
- The Wikipedia entry, and I am not vouching for the accuracy of this entry
- The CIA’s own description here
- KMWorld’s write up here. (I am a paid columnist for KMWorld, but I did not contribute to this story.)
The purpose of this feature is to provide a snapshot of the companies in which IN-Q-TEL has invested. I’ve identified more than 70 companies. This is too many to put in one posting, so I will break up the list and cover the period 2000 to 2003 here and do each subsequent year in additional Beyond Search postings.
In the period from 2000 to 2003, IN-Q-TEL invested in 25 companies. Keep in mind that I may have overlooked some in my research. If you know of a company I missed, please, use the comment section of this Web log to update my information. These appear in the table below:
HiQube: Another Business Intelligence System
May 25, 2008
Data management, not database, issues now dominate discussions about extracting information from log files, finding ways to manipulate without delay data in financial transactions, and making sense of telemetry data flows.
HiQube is a new high-performance business intelligence (BI) software solution that quickly delivers in-depth business analysis capability and superior reporting, as a result of its unique HiQube technology. HiQube technology is easy to use and is the first to combine hierarchical, relational and multidimensional database technologies. In doing so, it delivers users with unparalleled decision-making power. HiQube BI software solutions are available and supported worldwide.
In January 2007, Altair Engineering (Ann Arbor, Michigan) purchased Hicare, renamed the company, and began marketing the company’s technology more aggressively. Altair is a privately-held firm with an estimated $140 million in revenue in 2007.
The company’s official Web site is here. I found the pre-acquisition Web site more useful. It is here. Don’t let the Italian descriptions throw you. Google Translate makes short work of the language barrier.
What I find interesting is that innovations are coming from specialist firms often based outside the United States. I wrote about the Canadian outfit Infobright last week, now I want to talk about the Italian company HiQube (formerly HiCare).
The company’s technology is a proprietary database that combines three data management technologies in one system. You can manipulate data in a traditional relational form. You also can implement hierarchical data management. The approach I find most interesting is the company’s multi dimensional (n-cube) data managemnet system. If you are not sure of the differences among these types, let me offer a greatly simplified comment about each type:
- Relational–The Codd database. Think of a table in DB2, Oracle, or SQLServer. Data reside in columns and rows.
- Hierarchical–This is a structure in which records are organized as a tree or parent child relationship. Each child type is related to only one parent type
- Multidimensional–This is a data structure that has three or more independent dimensions; for instance, sales by region by product and by time.
HiQube developed what it called the Lilith Enterprise and Web Server business intelligence software, a decision-making support system with unparalleled graphing and reporting capabilities for interactive visualization of information. Lilith, which reminded me of a character on a popular US television show, provides the ability to view and analyze captured data from multiple perspectives and user profiles. The system is available for on premises installation. You can also use the technology as a Web service.
The Economics of Dealing with Complex Information
May 24, 2008
Microsoft announced via its Live Search blog that its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic are “taken down”. Google’s book digitization and journal project caused concern to the commercial database vendors. Google, with its generous cash flow and avowed goal of indexing “all the world’s information” seemed to sign the death warrants of such companies as Dialog, Ebsco, and ProQuest, among others. A flap of the wings to Techmeme for its related links.
The economics of doing anything significant with complex information are not taught in the ivory towers at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. Google–indifferent to the brutal economics that hobble commercial database publishers–has the cash to figure out how to use software to do tasks usually done by humans. For example, Google has figured out how to scan a book, have software determine what should be converted to ASCII, and generating a reasonably clean, searchable text file. The page images are mostly linked to the correspond text references. Not so for most database producers. These decisions still require humans, often working in exotic locations where labor is less expensive than in Ann Arbor, Boston, and Denver.
Google also has figured out how to take content, apply structure to it, create a variety of additional index terms (metadata), and convert the whole shebang into easily manipulated numerical representations. Not so with the mainstream commercial database publishers. Tagging, cross referencing, and content clean up still takes expensive humans.
Manipulating the information in books and journals is for commercial database producers very expensive. Many costs are difficult to reduce. Google, on the other hand, has invested over the last decade to find software solutions to these intractable cost problems. Fortunately for the commercial database publishers, Google so far has been content to process books and journals. Google finds access to weighty tomes useful for a variety of purposes. I haven’t heard that these motive forces are related to revenue. Google appears to be casual about the cost of its books and journals project. If you aren’t familiar with Google Books, navigate to http://books.google.com. For Google Scholar, go to http://scholar.google.com.
Enter Microsoft. The company jumped to index books and journals. Now it is climbing out of the swamp of costs. Unlike Google, Microsoft faces–maybe for the first time in the company’s history–a need to focus its technical and financial resources. Google keeps on scanning and indexing documents about hyperbolic geometry. Microsoft can’t and no longer will.
For me the most telling statement in the announcement is:
Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers. With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry and evaluate future opportunities.
Here’s how I read this. First, the reference to next-generation search is about making money with a business model. In short, next-generation search is not about moving beyond traditional metadata, pushing into data management, and creating new types of user experiences. Search at Microsoft means money.
Second, Microsoft wants to index what’s available. That’s certainly less costly than fiddling with the train schedules that Google has indexed at Oxford University. In my experience, indexing what is already available begs for applications that moves beyond what I can do at my local library or with a search engine such as Exalead.com or metasearch system such as Vivisimo’s Clusty.com.
Third, the notion of tracking and looking for future opportunities does not convince me that Microsoft knows what it will do tomorrow. And whatever the company does, by definition, will be reactive.
Microsoft’s termination of this service means that the status quo in the commercial database world will be subject to pressure from Google. More troubling is that Google’s technical papers and its patent documents reveal that the company is moving beyond key word search at an increasing pace. I think that it is significant that Microsoft is husbanding its resources. Now I want to read in a Microsoft Web log about an innovation path that will permit the company to leap frog over Google. Send me a link to this information, and you will receive a gentle quack.
Stephen Arnold, May 24, 2008
EMC’s Upcoming Plans
May 23, 2008
Last year, IBM created InfoPrint. When Ricoh, the Japanese copier outfit, invested, InfoPrint became a $1.2 billion company. The idea is that an organization has informatioin scattered in many different systems. IBM’s InfoPrint would make it possible for an organization to tap into these facts and data, generate an output, which could be a personalized invoice, a benefits statement or a Web page. Viewed one way, InfoPrint is a virtual print shop. Viewed another, it was an IBM play to bring some sort of order to the crazy, poorly-disciplined world of content management of CMS as its cheerleaders say.
Then a Lexington, Kentucky, company called Exstream Software was acquired by Hewlett-Packard earlier this year for $1.2 billion and change. Exstream became part of the HP’s printer unit, and marked a turning point in CMS; namely, the notion of software to produce a Web page became a tiny cog in a giant printing or output machine. The functionality in the HP model shifted from the department to the a meta function.
Optio, an early entrant in this sector, struggled and then found a buyer called Bottomline. And, at the same time Swedish-based segment leader Streamserve found itself smack in the middle of a CMS revolution.
These changes underscore the Balkanized state of information management in most organizations. To fix a big problem, each of these companies offer a big solution.
Will the H-bomb approach to helping workers write, access, and repurpose information work? Probably not, but it certainly means that the CMS vendors have to respond to the sins of their past.
In New York yesterday, I learned that EMC (once a vendor of storage devices) has begun to reposition itself to become a more significant player in a changing and increasingly contentious market.
Here’s a run down of what the storage company will do in 2008, if my source has her ear angled the right way.
First, EMC is going to be a player in the enterprise search market. Even though there are more than 300 vendors in this sector, EMC figures that there’s room for one more company. I’m not so sure because EMC’s archives often pose more challenges than they solve when it comes to finding the specific piece of information in one of EMC’s archives or buried in the bowels of its Documentum CMS.
Second, EMC is going to be a player in the eDiscovery business. Regulated industries have to save and be able to find information in archives. EMC reasons that this is a growing sector. If Autonomy (the number two company in enterprise search) can make a go with its Zantaz eDiscovery unit, EMC can certainly squeeze money from regulated or litigated entities. See my list of more than a dozen companies in this search niche now. EMC will have to find a way to sidestep some specialist companies and the aforementioned Autonomy which is smaller and more than willing to engage in hand-to-hand combat.
third, EMC is going to jump into the middle of the emerging enterprise publishing sytem market where InfoPrint, Exstream Software, and other player have gained some key sales in the auto industry, insurance, and health care sector. Remember, this is a market created because established CMS vendors like Documentum, Ektron, vignette, and a 100 others have created because their systems were more problemattic than panacea.
To top these ambitious plans off, EMC wants to enter the SaaS or cloud computing market. Cloud computing is an emerging trend. EMC is a company able to build high performance storage systems, but pulling off an Amazon or Google play is going to be an extra challenge for EMC.
You can read more about EMC’s plans for the next 12 months in the Computer Reseller News’ story about the company.
My thought is that EMC will want to set clear priorities and the realities of competing with the likes of IBM, Ricoh, and HP in a sector created largely because CMS sytems have been tarballs.
I think EMC has its work cut out for it. But once again, in today’s financial climate, some managers find it easier to assert that it can provide a one-stop shop for anything that has to do with information. Customers are looking for new solutions, and I think there will be blood on the floor of the conference room and red ink in the company swimming pool for high-tech companies who think their engineers can solve any problem–even the ones their previous software created.
What are your thoughts about the CMS tarballs? Can giants like IBM and HP learn new tricks? Can companies with a core competency in storage transform themselves into cloud-based services companies?
Based on what information I have, EMC will have a tough time delivering in just one sector–for example, enterprise search. Hitting home runs in these other sectors is going to require more than PR puffery.
Stephen Arnold, May 22, 2008
Enterprise Search Endnote
May 22, 2008
A surprised squawk from the Beyond Search goose. In the end note (the wrap up talk for the two day conference about enterprise search in New York City), the data bunny made a brief and long-awaited appearance. The introduction to the end note made a note that her name was henceforth ‘search bunny’. After the laughter subsided, I made these points to summarize the more than 36 presentation dilivered over the 14 hours of the formal program.
The Data Bunny makes an appearance
First, this conference marked the first major meeting about enterprise that discussed ways to improve usability of existing systems and move beyond key word retrieval. The point was that most enterprise search users don’t feel comfortable sticking words and phrases in a search box and then perusing lists of results to see if the magic answer has been delivered.
Second, research data from my work and other industry experts substantiate the need for alternative interfaces. Graphics, although tasty eye candy, are not the answer. Information must be provided in a manner that meets the needs of individual users and the work task at hand. Forcing a laundry list of results on every user is out of step with today’s information environment.
Third, interfaces can use mobile functionality such as that available from Coveo’s mobile mail search service. An interface can combine a search box with a list of topics and categories like the one on the Oracle Technology Network’s Web site which is based on Siderean Software’s technology. Google has disclosed in a patent application an interface that presents a dossier or report. Instead of a list of topics, the output includes facts about the topic. One feature is a hot link to a map showing the location of the subject. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
To wrap up the conference, the audience was challenged to:
- Demand more from vendors. Passivity, which allows the vendor to lead the licensee, has to give way to the licensee getting the vendor to deliver the solution the organization needs to succeed.
- Recognize that Google’s more than 9,500 Google Search Appliance licensees are buying into the idea that complex search is expensive, expensive, and prone to problems. Simplicity, stability, and extensibility are more important than 1,001 meaningless features.
- Embrace the opportunity to take a clean sheet of paper and redeine search in terms of information access.
The novelty of typing in two words and getting some results has given way to a greater appetite to solutions that work in the context of a work task.
After the formal presentation, several of the more than 300 in the audience, posed some questions. Here’s a summary of the questions that were asked more than one time:
Question: What’s the future of metadata and taxonomies?
Answer: Metadata is becoming more important. News types of metadata — who changed what in a document when? Who were the recipients of the document? — and similar trans-meta types of tagging are the next wave in metadata. So, the work associated with metadata is in its infancy.
Question: Why do you say ‘Search is dead?’
Answer: That’s shorthand for saying, “Most users don’t want to be shackled to a search box. Some users will want the search box as a primary means of access. A larger number of users want options for access. The search box, therefore, can no longer be the primary access vehicle in my opinion.
Question: Why did you mention only three companies?
Answer: I speak extemporaneously. I don’t read my talks. The examples–Coveo, Google, and Oracle–seemed relevant when I put together my examples 30 minutes before my remarks. I would like to have time to name many other vendors. I track the search and content processing technology of more than 50 organizations. In 20 minutes, there are hard limits on what I can do.
Question: Are you paid for these types of remarks?
Answer: I charge for everything. If organizations did not pay me, I would not be able to fund my research, pay for dog food, or buy airline tickets. As a consultant, my product is my time. Therefore, to use my time means that the conference organizer has to pay me.
Stephen Arnold, May 21, 2008
eDiscovery
May 21, 2008
I’m at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City. There’s quite a bit of talk about eDiscovery. What’s missing are a number of vendors who compete in this market sector. To fill this gap, here’s a partial list of vendors in this sector. Let me know if you have others whom you want me to add to this list.
| Company | Comment |
| AlphaLit | Litigation support and discovery document management |
| Applied Discovery | Electronic discovery |
| Digital Mountain Inc. | Discovery management – electronic discovery, computer forensics,data collection, filtering and processing |
| Discovery Mining | Hosted platform to manage electronic documents for regulation, retention and litigation. |
| EED, Inc. | Electronic evidence discovery |
| eMag Solutions | Electronic discovery, data conversion and data recovery, computer forensics |
| Global Digital Forensics | Computer forensics, electronic discovery, security auditing |
| InterLegis | Electronic discovery and data analytics |
| Kroll Ontrack | Electronic discovery, computer forensics, ESI consulting |
| LDiscovery | Electronic discovery and digital forensics |
| LitSoft, Inc. | Electronic discovery (Web 2.0) |
| Oce Business Services | Document process support, archiving and records management services |
| Recommind | Electronic discovery, enterprise search, email and information access management |
| RenewData | Electronic discovery, ESI risk management, evidence storage |
| RVM Inc. | Litigation support, document and content management |
| Techlaw Solutions | Electronic discovery,litigation support, information management |
Stephen Arnold, May 21, 2008
Silobreaker: When Intelligence Officers Solve Their Own Info Problems
May 20, 2008
“The Holy Grail”, one former intelligence officer told me, “is to walk in my office and have what I need on my desk, on the computer monitor, and on the screen of my secure telephone.” (You can recognize these whizzy mobile phones because some have an extra light and other features to make it hard for the bad guy to listen in on the call.)
I forget that most people in the online business don’t have experience working in intelligence, the military and law enforcement. When I see an allegedly “hot new semantic search system”, I often take a cursory look and then walk on by. The reason is that the idea of searching is not where the action is for serious intelligence.
If you do a search on Mother Google, you will find more than 300,000 references to the company. To give you a benchmark, if you search for this Web log, you get about 230,000 references with most of them to a search engine optimization company with the same name. The point is that certain services or resources, no matter how useful, are tough to find unless you know exactly what to enter in the search box.
Let me illustrate. Here’s a screen shot of a system that has been available for several years.
The query “semantic search” returned a main story, secondary items in smaller “newspaper” style boxes, an embedded live video from CeBIT, a bar chart about term frequency, and an “In Focus” section that provides the names of people and things the Silobreaker system identified as important. (If you look at the people in the “In Focus” box, you’ll see me (Stephen Arnold) identified despite my <230,000 Web log references in Google.)
Notice that Silobreaker’s default display is a report. The system delivers a synthesis of what’s important. There’s no result list. No single graphic gizmo floating in the browser without meaningful context. Silobreaker looks great but it contains a significant amount of go juice. Navigate here to explore the system yourself.
Silobreaker doesn’t do plain vanilla laundry lists. You can see a list of documents, but you see them in context; that is, a specific knowledge setting. You don’t have to ask, “What the heck does that mean?” Silobreaker presents the meaning of each item in a display.
Most of the search systems I see or get asked to review don’t do what I need done. I want to comment on a basic Silobreaker output and point out a few facts about the system. Once that housekeeping is done, I will make several observations in an effort to spark discussion about the sorry state of enterprise search and commercial business intelligence systems. For a reader who finds my criticism of the best that Silicon Valley has to offer offensive, stop reading now. If you want to see where the rubber meets the race track in the intelligence community, keep reading. Read more
Enterprise Search: The Good, the Bad, the Downright Ugly
May 17, 2008
Author’s Note: This essay is the basis for my conference end note, which I deliver on May 21, 2008. The venue is Information Today’s Enterprise Search Summit. The program committee has slotted me in the anchor position to provide an overview of what the more than 40 speakers said and to keep some attendees from rushing to the airport. The idea is that I am controversial and some vendors want to hear what I say so they can get the attorneys organized to write me threatening letters. My actual remarks are based on the essay below.
Yes, I am wearing bunny rabbit ears. I was going to put on my bikini, but at my lawyer told me, “You can be sued for assault.” I am wearing the ears.
The reason? A big wig at a large, really ethical pharmaceutical company–maybe that’s an oxymoron– told me that my 1980 picture on my Web log here was “unprofessional” and “disturbing”. Well, in 1980, when I talked to a group of executives, online search and data were unknown. Business executives are conservative, like the Roman ruler Caligula’s advisors. The ears broke the ice. Anyway, I’m not the one in hot water with the FDA. Maybe those guys should wear them?
Today (May 21, 2008) everyone in this room plus your friends and your children use online information services. A fat, old guy wearing bunny rabbit ears makes zero difference. You saw more interesting sights in Greenwich Village on your way to dinner, correct?
What is different about search today? It’s ubiquitous. Also, it is essentially unchanged. Here’s a screen shot of a system that displays information in an interesting way. Here’s a Google report. Sorry it’s in black and white, but I am a persona non grata at Google. I have to scour the open source literature to find out that the Googlers also know traditional search isn’t going to cut it moving forward.
What I learned at the conference, and I admit I could not sit through every session. I had to poke my head in and out of sessions. Feel free to push back if you disagree. Even better, I will pay you $2.00 (that’s my usual $1.00 adjusted for inflation.)
The Good
The speakers who prepared–Sue Feldman and Martin White–made the conference worthwhile. The speakers who recycled product literature and said, “I’m giving a product review” made the conference useful. I like product reviews. Also, I like the Google Search Appliance, probably because my son, Erik, would make my life miserable if I didn’t effuse Google goodness. I also like the systems I profile in my Beyond Search study, which you can buy from Frank Gilbane, a content impresario.
The Bad
Man, infomercials. I sit in a session. The speaker has an affiliation unrelated to a search vendor. The talk is the vendor’s sales pitch. These are a total waste of time, and the speakers should be sent to Toastmasters International or a remedial speech class. My view is that there are more of these “planted talks” than ever before. It’s a disturbing trend that I have seen at other conferences this year sponsored by other companies and with independent program committees. Not good.
The Ugly
I want to spend the remaining time on five points. Then I will pay $2.00 for a question. You can start thinking about the errors in my analysis now, and I don’t have any reluctance to let you pin me to the wall for my opinions.
- Talking about semantic search, Web 3.0, and text mining does not a business make. In fact, the whole PR blitz about “better search” leaves me cold. It’s not that these buzzwords don’t mean something. They do. The systems aren’t a leap forward.
- Enterprise search is a problem. The vendors can’t and won’t talk about their disasters. The licensees are often prohibited by the license terms from saying negative things about a system. My research, Jane Russell’s in Paris, Sinequa’s, and studies summarized for me by Martin White make one point: 60 to 70 percent of the users of Big Name search systems are dissatisfied. That’s not going to change as long as these companies sell systems that date from the late 1980s. On my blog I posted the tag lines for about two dozen vendors. The average age of the companies? 1997. Nothing new, folks. Nothing new.
- Google is a big deal in the enterprise, and I am getting tired of hearing people dismiss the company’s presence as trivial or an aberration. My sources reveal that Google is THE largest enterprise search vendor. The company has more than 9,500 GSA licensees. The company is struggling to deal with inquiries about geo spatial, hosted services, and other cloud-based products. Does Google tell me this? No, Google’s Larry Page remembers that he squabbled with me in 2000 at the Boston Search Engine Meeting, and he wants me put in the Smithsonian’s computing exhibit, locked in with the UNIVAC.
- Costs are not just a problem. The costs associated with enterprise search are going to be a major problem going forward. Data transformation can consume as much as 30 percent of an IT department’s budget. The customization costs of some enterprise search systems are so high that licensees can’t make a system better. Take a look at the pre-acquisition Verity. It was a services firm, not a search vendor. Now other vendors are going for this high margin business. Some enterprise search systems are designed to sell consulting.
- Scaling ain’t us. Most of the vendors whose systems I examine for my various reports and studies don’t scale gracefully. What does this mean? It means that a licensee has to throw hardware at a problem, figure out how to tune a complex system on a complicated Frankenstein infrastructure, and figure out how to make these changes without trashing the index and going back to square one. Some systems scale. Siderean, Exalead, Coveo, ISYS. I can’t name them all. What’s important is that none of the Big Names scale gracefully. Up-and-comers, profiled in Beyond Search–my new study–do a better job of this.
Wrap Up
So what did I learn? The marketing frenzy that infects so much of our information world has reached enterprise search. The vendors and their financial challenges make it tough to get the straight dope on search systems. Finally, people who volunteer to speak at conferences often spend little time creating a presentation that will knock the attendees’ socks off.
What did I like? I like the sector. It’s booming. There’s a lot a interesting stuff out there. Cluuz.com. Silobreaker. Look to the newer systems. Oh, don’t ignore Googzilla. Think surf on Googzilla.
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2008
Video Search Bragging Rights: Blinkx Says It Is Bigger Than Google Video
May 16, 2008
For those stuck in northbound traffic on the slow moving river of traffic that is Highway 101, a quite large billboard that told me that Blinkx is the world’s largest video search engine.” In mid-May 2008, a rumor swirled across the Internet that News Corp. was kicking Blinkx’s tires. Was an acquisition in the wind? Was this billboard part of an acquisition campaign? Was it a reminder to Silicon Valley that Google’s span of control did not include video search?
I was sensitive to digitized video for two reasons. The Auto Channel told me that it has thousands of hours of automotive-related video. One interesting aspect of this is that when a video gets “hot”, it gets a great deal of traffic. What’s mystifying, if I understood what The Auto Channel told me, is that it’s very hard to predict what will strike the user’s fancy.
The other reason is that I spoke with a programmer who once did a bit of work for a couple of the large European video services. I can’t reveal the name of the project this person worked on, but it rhymes with “goosed”. The point was that video is flooding the Internet, and it is difficult to generate enough revenue to keep up with the research, development, programming, and bandwidth charges. Video on a metered line is important to many users, but, if I understood his comments, those users don’t pay. Advertisers want “tight” demographics, and the usage data aren’t compelling enough to allow some video sites to generate enough cash to stay alive at this time.
I am not sure how much video Blinkx has indexed. I heard from one of my sources that Google receives more than 1.2 million video uploads per month. I recall reading that the GOOG accounts for more than 60 percent of video search traffic, but since the ComScore traffic flap, it’s tough to know just how much traffic Google has. Could be 70 percent, maybe more. A few days ago, ComScore said Google was the number one Web site on earth. Maybe? Maybe not? Google knows because it does not have to estimate its traffic. My sources tell me that Google just counts traffic, no sampling necessary, to skew the data.
The Blinkx tag line is “Over 26 million hours of video. Search it all.” Their system appears to have a slather of patent documents in place. I tallied more than 100 when I stopped counting. Its conceptual search that includes speech recognition, neural networks, and machine learning to create text transcripts. That text is then searched.
Enterprise Search Vendors’ Taglines
May 16, 2008
A colleague in San Francisco asked me on May 14, 2008, “How do the search engine vendors position themselves?”
I told him that I would think about the question on the luxurious red-eye flight from SFO to Detroit. I did. I worked through the files on my trusty laptop and compiled a list of the taglines for some of the vendors whom I monitor. The list is not exhaustive, but I had data about a couple of dozen companies in the behind-the-firewall search business.
The table below provides a summary of the taglines. These are quite interesting, and I was surprised at the different approaches taken to explaining the companies’ systems. For example, I liked the taglines that echoed Caesar’s I came, I saw, I conquered (Vini, vidi, vici). SchemaLogic says, “Find. Use. Protect.” Thetus asserts, “Find. Assess. Fit. Understand.” Lexalytics crafts, “Discover. Understand. Act.”
Several of the companies use active or instrumental catchphrases. Brainware, a spin out from a German content management company, uses, “Intelligence unleashed.” I thought of a tiger pursuing me through the Louisville Zoo. And InQuira says, “Harvest knowledge.” Nstein, a company that has undergone accelerated evolution,
Less creative influences put a damper on marketing passion in these slogans. Panoptic (now Funnelback) gently offers, “Internet and Enterprise Search.” Almost matching the Australian’s tagline is Fast Search & Transfer’s “The business of search.” Clearforest matches these in understatement with its “Text Analytics Solutions.” ZyLAB comes close too, saying, “Infomation Access Solutions.”
Other companies use the tagline as elevator speeches on a diet. For example, Endeca, flush with investments from Intel and SAP, states, “Innovative Software to Help People Explore, Analyze, and Understand Information.” Not to be outdone in the pitch department is ISYS Search Software’s “Enterprise Search Solutions for Real People Doing Business in the Real World.” (I like the “real” part of this statement because some of the taglines are a bit abstract.) Stratify (formerly Purple Yogi) stikes a Zen-like note: “Focus on the Matter of eDiscovery with Peace of Mind.” When I repeat this five times, my heart rate slows and my blood pressure drops.
Other vendors assert that their system is Numero Uno in the search-and-retrieval sector in a nice way, of course. Open Text, a company with as many search technologies as Microsoft, declares themselves “The Content Experts.” And, Dieselpoint opines, “The Leader in Search & Navigation Technology.”
A small number of vendors drift into the poetic. Exegy uses repetition and alliteration to explain its super-fast appliance: “Extreme Speed. Extreme Insight.” Or, SurfRay (owner of Mondosoft and Speed of Mind) and its rhytmic “We Move People to Discover.” Note that SurfRay itself, a relative newcomer to search, describes itself this way, “Pioneers in Enterprise Search and Behavior Analytics.” Strong stuff and sure to cat catch the attention of Autonomy working overtime to catch up with the “Don’t be evil” Googlers.
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