Autonomy Technology a Good Buy Says HP Big Dog Isherwood
September 15, 2014
If you follow the HP Autonomy firefights, you will enjoy “Autonomy Deal Fallout ‘More Extreme’ Than Hoped, says HP’s UK boss Andy Isherwood:
In spite of HP’s allegations that Lynch and senior Autonomy management inflated revenues with phantom deals and hidden low-margin sales, Isherwood liked what he found. Technologically at least it was a good buy, he insists….We’re seeing clearly a lot more customer buying so it’s not an issue with the product.”
I also noted the positive signal of one percent revenue growth. Mr. Isherwood asserts:
Despite the decline in outsourcing revenues, a global trend, HP surprised Wall Street last month with 1pc revenue growth – its first in a dozen quarters – on the back of increasing share of the PC market. The UK picture was better still, with only outsourcing in decline. After falling last year overall sales here are on track to grow 7pc, says Isherwood.
With this atta boy and positive financials, what went wrong with Autonomy? As Isherwood says:
Unsurprisingly, he has only good things to say about the leadership of Whitman, Lynch’s nemesis. She is nearly two years into a five-year plan to turn the HP oil tanker, with increased investment in research and development, and a focus on the big trends of cloud computing, mobile working and big data as part an attempt to turn HP’s scale and diversity to its advantage. “HP is a broad-based company,” says Isherwood. “Meg understood that immediately. At that time we had said we were going to hive off the PC business, but she came in and said ‘no’, the power is in the broad portfolio.”
If there’s no management culpability, HP wants its money back. Interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2014
Thinking about Enterprise Search? VUCA Is for You
September 8, 2014
the Harvard business Review is embracing some of the alleged jargon used by intel analysts, warfighters, and with-it Beltway Bandits. Now the relationship between use of the acronym VUCA and everyday business decisions about toner and where to have lunch is tenuous at best. The term warrants a comment.
First, however, what does the write up “A Framework for Understanding VUCA” share with the managers of the world? The article defines VUCA as “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.” Ah, these are the concepts that have launched a 1,000 marketing presentations about search, analytics, and content processing. A fancy new, state of the art, analytics system incorporating entity extraction, faceting, and linguistic understanding will help make VUCA a bad dream. VUCA is like Ebola for an organization. Bad indeed. No reliable cure. High mortality rate. VUGA = Bad.
Next, VUCA makes planning difficult. “Hey, it’s crazy out there.” This seems pretty tricky. The HBR write up suggests tackling VUCA with flexibility. Fight with a quadrant, not the original analytics based Boston Consulting grid. VUCA requires one of those squishy grids with quite a bit of subjectivity.
Also, the HBR content requires reading and a sound function. When I accessed the rich media, I heard nothing. A flaw in my system or a reminder of the challenges VUCA presents to publishers as well as lesser managers.
Second, what’s VUCA have to do with search, analytics, and content marketing. Given the spectacular thrashing over Autonomy and the lesser stomping around about Lucid Works (originally Lucid Imagination), VUCA seems to be a large part of the information retrieval sales process and the management process. Stated another way, search, analytics, and content processing are supposed to decrease VUCA. The reality seems to be that where search, analytics, and content processing are deployed, VUCA becomes a very big deal. It does not work particularly well and there is no easy way to figure out what’s right, what’s incorrect, what’s broken, and what’s actually useful.
So the equation can be modified to state VUCA=Search.
One of the comments to the HBR VUCA analysis is interesting to me; to wit:
The VUCA label is so typical in the business world. The idea
that it’s new is such a load of crap. To use it for an excuse not to develop and execute a strategy or plan is abdication of the highest order. I’d say I have as much experience in this as most. Launching a successful international passenger and cargo airline in an active war zone clearly involved all the elements of VUCA. Your analysis is correct. Any leader must deal with these elements daily. The idea that the world is somehow more uncertain, complex or ambiguous is garbage. Volatility varies regularly over time. You create and execute a strategy in this world the same way you did in the world of yesterday and stop whining.
Why not order up a T shirt with VUCA=Ebola to make the point.
For me, consultants will love VUCA. I can’t wait for mid tier consultants to use this hip military lingo in their content marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, September 8, 2014
LucidWorks Takes Bullets, Mid Tier Consultant Gets Some Info Upside Down and Backward
September 6, 2014
Navigate to “Trouble at LucidWorks: Lawsuits, Lost Deals, & Layoffs Plague the Search Startup Despite Funding.”
Another search vendor struggling for survival is not a surprise. What is interesting is that the write up identifies that venture money was needed to stay afloat, a youthful whiz kid cannot deliver revenues, and that former staff say some pretty negative things.
What struck me as interesting was the information smashed into some sentences from a mid tier consulting firm’s search expert. Did you know that Microsoft gives away Fast Search & Transfer technology. This the same code that received high marks in a magic quadrant and contributed to a jail sentence for the founder of Fast Search. Did you know Did you know that the Google Search Appliance was a low cost search option? I did not. In fact, if you look up prices on the US government’s GSAadvantage.gov site, the GSA is a pretty expensive solution. Did you know that make money in open source search is not easy? Maybe not easy but it seems as if RedHat is doing okay.
Why do I ask these questions? I enjoy pointing out that what looks like reasonable statements from an expert may be “out of square.” For color on this reference, see this Beyond Search article.
What about LucidWorks? The company struggled with creating revenue around a layer of software that interacts with Lucene. There were squabbles, turnover in senior management, and pivots.
What is important is that even when a search and content processing company minimizes these and other issues, search is a darned tough software segment to make spin cash.
LucidWorks may survive. But in the larger context of information retrieval, the long shadows cast by Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer are reminders that painting word pictures about complex technology may be much easier than building a search company with sustainable revenues.
Stephen E Arnold, September , 2014
HP Autonomy: A Twist?
August 26, 2014
I read “U.S. Judge Casts Doubt on HP-Shareholder Settlement in Autonomy Lawsuit.” The write up seems to point to another chapter in the Hewlett Packard Autonomy litigation. If the article is spot on, I learned:
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said the settlement contained a “potentially fatal” provision, under which HP would hire shareholder attorneys to pursue claims against ex-Autonomy executives. He said that provision may prevent his approving the deal.
Assume this is correct. HP would have to go back to the drawing board with regard to a shareholder allegation about the deal. Instead of putting Autonomy on the hot seat, HP may have to deal with shareholders who see HP management as having some flaws.
Instead of reading about Mike Lynch, we would be getting some insight into what the HP board and folks like Meg Whitman were thinking about search and content processing.
My view is that enterprise information retrieval is shadowed by a somewhat gray cloud. If search is the Big Thing, the value of these systems should be evident. Instead we learn that search is a contentious issue. I am curious about the reasoning HP used to justify buying an enterprise search and content processing system that was 15 years young? Once that decision was made, what MBA magic was at work to produce the purchase price? What was Meg Whitman’s contribution to this deal when it took place?
Do other search vendors benefit from the notoriety of this search deal? My hunch is that the flailing many search vendors’ marketing demonstrates is that search is not an Emmy winning solution.
Search is easy to misunderstand and difficult to covert into a money machine. The HP Autonomy matter is a living, breathing case study of that does call attention to the challenges search presents. For those seeking cases studies about search, the HP Autonomy matter is a headliner.
The matter is a reminder that search which everyone thinks he or she understands may not be quite so simple.
Stephen E Arnold, August 26, 2014
Quote to Note: The Curse of Smart People
July 7, 2014
Here’s a gem. The source is “Google Employee Blows the Whistle on Search Giant’s Problem with Over-Confident ‘Geek Types Living in a Bubble‘.
The quote is from Avery Pennarun, a Googler (maybe soon to be a Xoogler) who allegedly said:
Smart people have a problem especially when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.
I must admit that here in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, rationalizations are not as popular as brawls and shouting.
I don’t understand the “Impostor Syndrome”, but I accept that I don’t get quite a few aspects of the modern world.
I would be happy if search results were focused on precision, recall, and similar old-fashioned ideas. I wonder if the Googlers in Mountain View have ever walked around East Palo Alto and checked out the housing, the stores, and the quality of life? Does a Google Maps search show details in East Palo Alto? Cuba Libre in Washington, DC, was unfindable and it was only a couple of blocks from Google’s DC office.
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2014
RSuite Incorporates Temis into Content Management Platform
May 8, 2014
RSuite content management users can now can tap into TEMIS, we learn from “RSuite CMS Leverages TEMIS’s Content Enrichment Capabilities to Deliver a Powerful Semantic Solution.” The partnership makes TEMIS’s semantic enrichment capabilities available to RSuite’s customers in the publishing, government, and corporate arenas. The deal was announced at this year’s MarkLogic World conference, held April seventh in San Francisco; both companies are MarkLogic partners.
The press release elaborates:
“RSuite CMS provides an intuitive user interface that minimizes actions required to execute complex searches across an entire set of content. The solution can globally apply metadata, dynamically organize massive amounts of documents into collections, package and distribute content to licensing partners, and enables customers to meet their multi-channel publishing goals.
“By leveraging TEMIS’s Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform, RSuite CMS can enable customers to automatically enrich their content with domain-specific metadata directly within their publishing workflows. This enables faster and more scalable content indexing, improved metadata consistency and governance, more efficient authoring, and more powerful search and discovery features within customer applications and portals.”
With its focus on publishing and media, RSuite strives to meet today’s ever-evolving publication challenges. The company serves such big names as HarperCollins, Audible, and Oxford University Press. RSuite was launched in 2000 and is located in Audubon, Pennsylvania.
With its collaborative platform, TEMIS adds domain-specific metadata to clients’ data, allowing publishers to supply more relevant information to their own audiences. TEMIS maintains several offices across Europe and North America.
Cynthia Murrell, May 08, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Plus and the Shadow of Orkut
April 25, 2014
Remember Orkut?
Google was into social networks when Orkut Büyükkökten cooked up the site after he joined the GOOG in 2002. Not long after Orkut became available, an outfit called Affinity Engines initiated an allegation that Mr. Büyükkökten was inspired by InCircle code. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Affinity did not buy my mother’s catchphrase.
There were some alleged and interesting coincidences between the InCircle code and the Orkut code; for example, eight or nine allegedly identical bugs. Well, Google and InCircle worked out their differences, but Orkut was off to the races. From Brazil to India, Orkut became popular. Some of the uses of Orkut were surprising to me. In 2008, Orkut had become a hit in Brazil and India. In the US, not so much. Orkut has been tweaked, redesigned, and relaunched for more than a decade. Orkut added some nifty features like video chat. There were allegations that some users were engaging in anti-social behavior. Brazilian authorities showed interest in the service due to allegations regarding some Orkutians use of the service. Surprising to some is the fact that Orkut was a pioneer of sorts. I find the trajectory of Orkut to be an early example of Google’s approach to “obvious” Internet services: An inability to avoid legal hassles and generate sustainable, substantive revenue.
Cracks in the off ramp to Google from the Information Highway. Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_engineering
Enter Google Plus or Google+, essentially an unsearchable name for an online service. (I am intentionally skipping over Wave and other socially innovations.) In 2011, Google rolled out another social networking service. Google executives suggested that Google Plus was the “new” Google. Over the last two years, Google hooked Google Plus into other Google services. The nature of online and other types of electronic services is that monopolies are a natural phenomenon. Google Plus, then, was the glue that would help hold together disparate services in one “new” Google. Identity, advertising, and integration were the drumbeats pounded out by the GOOG’s marketing band.
Well, how is that working out for some of the Google’s best and brightest?
I read various reports about the departure of Vic Gundotra, the face of Google Plus. See, for example, “Google+ Is Walking Dead.” With dozens of enthusiastic analysts providing their views of the shuffle, there is not much left for a hopelessly confused old person in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, to add.
I did jot down three ideas about this ripple in the alleged future of Google.
First, Google is focused on keeping its revenues flowing in order to have cash to do the many different things that Google deems important. The shift to mobile is stressing the GOOG. The upheaval at Google Plus is one more signal that the clarity of mission evident in the period from 2002 to 2006 has become like Seinfeld’s puffy shirt.
Second, after decades of effort, Google is pegged to its implementation of the GoTo / Overture revenue model. Where’s the revenue come from? Search. But as mobile search puts pressure on Google’s GoTo / Overture desktop search inspiration, tensions are likely to continue to rise among the senior managers at Google. That will definitely improve the working relationships within the Google universe.
Third, Google Plus, like Orkut, demonstrates that Google can spot a good idea, emulate it, and then struggle with execution and monetization. Effort upon effort have preceded the Google Plus kerfuffle. More will follow? Will the next big thing be Loon, Glass, or yet another reworking of YouTube?
From my point of view, Google has, in the words of the Righteous Brothers’ song:
You’ve lost that loving feeling, oh that loving feeling
You’ve lost that loving feeling, now it’s gone, gone, gone
Do the founders of Google and the firm’s senior management team have this golden oldie on their Android phone? A Google search won’t answer this question. Come to think of it Google search has become so unwieldy for certain queries that I cannot find an answer. As the song lyrics remind me,
Bring back that loving feeling, now it’s gone, gone, gone
And I can’t go on, no oh oh
This sounds like a sentiment I should post on the Beyond Search Facebook page.
Stephen E Arnold, April 25, 2014
Improvement to SharePoint Records Management
April 4, 2014
Early iterations of SharePoint records management were fraught with shortcomings. But the word has come that SharePoint 2013 offers an improvement on the failings of the past. Read more in the Search Content Management story, “SharePoint Records Management Spans New Forms of Content.”
The article begins:
“In prior releases, SharePoint records management was functional but nothing to write home about. But with SharePoint 2013, it’s time to get excited. The trends of mobile computing, social media in the enterprise, the cloud, and global search have converged and touched just about every business process that depends on IT. Records management is no exception.”
Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and offers up his analysis and opinions on his Web site ArnoldIT.com. SharePoint gets a lot of coverage due to its prominence in the market. But, Arnold consistently finds that the huge platform of SharePoint lags behind the smaller more agile offerings on the market. Only time will tell if the improvements in mobile, social, and records management will increase the overall functionality and user experience of the product.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 4, 2014
Innovation Tips for Information Management
April 1, 2014
Inmagic is an information management brand from Lucidea. Lucidea’s claim to fame is its development and implementation of social knowledge network for enterprise organizations. Social knowledge network is a new term for us and according to Lucidea it means mining information silos and creating knowledge-based communicates to improve productivity, collaboration, and better initiatives. In the recent white paper “Addressing The Innovation Imperative For B2B Companies,” Inmagic covered the topic of innovation.
The white paper explains that innovation is imperative to companies and highlights several key practices to make innovation work for a company. The first practice is to align innovation to strategy:
“Mapping innovation and product decision-making processes to business strategy ensures that product development efforts are consistent with your company’s goals. Since ideas from customers may not correlate with company strategy, this ensures that ideas – even good ideas – that are strategically misaligned are not inappropriately prioritized.”
The biggest problem with starting with this practice is assuming that a strategy exists in the first place. Many businesses have trouble focusing their goals into a conceivable strategy. Building a strategy should be the goal.
The second practice involves keeping product managers and other necessary employees in the loop. It is another practice that assumes the company already has products and product managers. What about organizations that do not have either, but instead offer a different type of service?
That leads to another question: what is innovation? We can always go by the dictionary definition, but would it not be better to define how Inmagic defines it in this white paper?
Whitney Grace, April 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New Age Management and Search Vendors
March 30, 2014
I once saw a cartoon with the caption “Ready, Fire, Aim.” The artist showed the person with a handgun pointing the barrel at his head. I am not too keen on the Ready, Fire, Aim approach to walking my dog. When it comes to figuring out what to do for money, I eschew the Ready, Fire, Aim as well.
Not for some whizzy Silicon Valley type management theorists and practitioners. Navigate to “Tom Erickson of Acquia, on the Philosophy of Ready, Fire, Aim.” If the real journalists take the story down, you can find it in the dead tree edition of the New York Times, page 2 of the Sunday Business Section for March 30, 2014.
I like spontaneity, but I don’t want Max and Tess to chase after a poodle. My boxers like to play rugby. Poodles like to knit, do yoga, and bite socks. So, no Ready, Fire, Aim when I have to take my senior advisors for their daily constitutionals. With regard to money, I take the alleged Ben Franklin aphorism, A penny saved is a penny earned seriously. Ben, as you may know, went with the Ready, Fire, Aim approach to interpersonal relations and was sent home from France if I recall my history teacher’s anecdote correctly.
The New York Times, an outfit that has faced some management challenges, has in its files some data about one of its Ready, Fire, Aim ideas: The New York Times Online. If I recall that system, it was a flop. Coming on the heels of killing the exclusive with LexisNexis, not only did the gray lady real journalists blow off seven figures of easy money, the NYT floundered through multiple online systems. Will the real journalists get their money back on that Ready, Fire, Aim decision and its financial consequences? I don’t think the jury is in, but in my view, some accounting magic may be needed since that decision 30 years ago.
What’s Ready, Fire, Aim management?
According to the write up, nicely presented by the real journalists. I noted this sentence alleged spoken by Mr. Erickson of Acquia, a outfit that “Acquia gives organizations unparalleled FREEDOM [sic] to unify content, community and commerce.” In short, Acquia is a services firm based on open source technology. How much hotter a market sector is there?
Now Mr. Erickson’s statement, attributed to his farther:
“We need to be on the forefront of what’s next.”
For those who believe in the power of technology and innovation, this is an important lesson. “Forefront” and “what’s next.” The problem, of course, is that figuring out what’s next is tough. Money doesn’t do it. Brains in masses don’t do it. I am not sure what produces innovation. Elasticsearch, an open source search vendor built on the ashes of Compass, has sort of just happened.
The next component of Ready, Aim, Fire struck me as tucked into this statement allegedly made by Mr. Erickson:
“I learned that I could sell.”
Okay, the ability to solve a person’s problems, be spontaneously helpful, and function like a fraternity or sorority president are part of Ready, Fire, Aim. (Well, maybe selling and Ready, Fire, Aim are not exactly management, but let’s move forward, shall we?)
Ready, Fire, Aim and selling combine in this way:
People would try to tell me, “We need to do things differently here.” I’d say, “No, this is how you stay on message, on target.”
The formula worked in Australia, France, Japan, and obviously in the US of A.
With these tantalizing knowledge tchotchkes, the threads are stitched together into one seamless insight:
One thing I preach a lot about is the importance of “ready, fire, aim.” There are people in the world who are ready-aim-fire types. If I sense from an interview that they are a ready-aim-fire person, I’ll tell them: “I don’t think this is the right place for you.
Mr. Erickson does not want colleagues who are interested in a job “where precision matters and the ability to get the right answer will be valued.”
Let’s think about this searing notion. Mr. Erickson (hypothetically) has a medical problem. Does he seek out health care with a track record of performance, maybe based on excellent training, evidence based medicine, and in touch with modern devices? Or, does Mr. Erickson seek out a health care professional who does the “Ready, Aim, Fire” thing? My hunch is that the decision will lean toward a professional or system where precision and the ability to get the “right answer” are important. Guessing, hunches, and random medications—probably not in the cards I would suggest.
What’s this have to do with search and content processing?
In my view, Mr. Erickson’s management philosophy is likely to work sometimes. But what works for more companies is rather less loose and spontaneous. Products and services are offered. Contracts are signed. Stuff happens and the customer pays the bills. Government regulations are followed (at least one hopes). People get paid. These are routine management functions. Many venture funded companies are not particularly skilled in these administrative swamps.
In my experience, the work of whizzy open source and proprietary search and content processing companies is raising money, generating revenue via agility, and exiting with a profit for the founders. The disconnect between the objective of the customer and the goals of the employees is often visible for those who take the time to look for signs of a discontinuity. Chaos produces visible activity. Chaos does not lead to consistent results. Even Google hired an adult and has tried to become more businesslike.
My view is that Ready, Fire, Aim may result in feeding the lucky Kentucky hunter a dead squirrel for lunch. But for most activities from walking the dog to figuring out how to earn a living, Ready, Aim, Fire is a cartoon-like caricature of quite complex and subtle activities. Too much rigidity is as unproductive as too much looseness.
Remember that gun pointed at the cartoon figure? Is that your idea of a thoughtful, insightful, and responsible behavior? The woes of companies that take the Ready, Aim, Fire approach to business is the trail of failures documented in the profile at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.
For me, sales skill does not equal innovation. Ready, Aim, Fire does not equate to management expertise. For the New York Times and the funding entities pumping tens of millions into duplicative search and content processing vendors, where is that gun pointed? A company that has lost money for five, 10, or more years is likely to lose money next year? Ready, Aim, Fire is humorous except to those who want their money back, customers who want a problem solved, and employees who want to work in a stable organization.
Success is tough to plan, but should one manage using the methods of a drive by shooter?
Stephen E Arnold, March 30, 2014
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