ISYS Search Software CEO Interview
December 1, 2008
Scott Coles has joined ISYS Search Software as the firm’s chief executive officer. Ian Davies, founder, remains the chairman of the company. Among Mr. Coles’s tasks will be to lead the firm’s new strategic direction characterized by an expanded presence in Europe and Asia, specialized vertical-market offerings, a broader channel sales strategy, and a deeper set of embedded search solutions for original equipment manufacturers and independent software vendors.
Coles joins ISYS with a significant background in the commercialization of innovation for multinational corporations, holding senior executive roles with companies such as EDS, Lucent Technologies and Avaya. In the mid-1990s, Scott was the driving force behind the establishment and success of AT&T Bell Labs in Australia.
In his interview with ArnoldIT.com’s Search Wizards Speak, Coles provided information about the company’s focus in 2009.
On this topic, he said:
We are seeing significant increase in other software vendors coming to us to license our engine for incorporation into their products. This marks a general industry trend that I believe will increase significantly in the coming year. A number of applications today that previously had either none or only rudimentary search are finding that their products can be significantly enhanced with a sophisticated search engine. The amount of data that these applications have to deal with is now becoming so large that some form of pre-processing to narrow down to that which is relevant is becoming essential.
Mr. Coles also noted that Microsoft SharePoint continues to capture market share in content management and collaboration. However, the SharePoint user needs access to a range of content and:
ISYS can search all data, both inside and outside of SharePoint. In addition, ISYS provides high quality relevant results through features such as Boolean search operators, multi-dimensional clustering, and many others for which SharePoint users have expressed a desire that are currently not available in the native SharePoint product…we’ve taken great care to ensure our new “intelligent content analysis” methods are reliable, predictable and easily understood by the end user. These include parametric search and navigation, visual timeline refinement bars, intelligence clouds, de-duplication and intelligent query expansion. We’ve even added additional post-query processing to help streamline the e-discovery process. The end result is a core set of new capabilities that help our customers better cull and refine efficiently, without cutting corners on accuracy or relevance.
You can read the full text of the interview with Scott Coles at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak or click here.
Concept Searching
November 30, 2008
Concept Searching Inc. offers a suite of horizontal search and classification products with the goal of delivering critical precision and recall. They’re moving beyond keyword identification and traditional taxonomy approaches. As the company’s tagline “Retrieval Just Got Smarter” suggests, the products use compound term processing to manage unstructured content. The concept extraction improves access to unstructured information so companies can better leverage data. What’s useful is that their cross-platform products, a search program, a classifier, a taxonomy manager, and SQL, are fully integrated with Microsoft SharePoint. There’s no need for a separate index, and the suite respects preset SharePoint security. Features can be integrated or delivered in pieces, and system access is administered using standard SharePoint administrative tools. Some of these functions were among the most popular in the SurfRay Ontolica product which is now long in the tooth. Perhaps Concept Searching will benefit from what seems to be a growing demand for SharePoint tools.
Jessica Brather, November 30, 2008
Microformats Primer
November 27, 2008
You probably know everything there is to know about microformats. If you are a bit shaky on this approach to making stupid documents a bit smarter, you can read about these conventions for using descriptive class names to add semantics to content. Click here for more information. Emily Lewis, A Blog Not Limited, has created a series of articles about microformats. You can access them here. A happy quack from a non Thanksgiving goose to Ms. Lewis for her work.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2008
Google: No Semantic Search
November 27, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Google Not Interested in Semantic Search.” You can read the short article on Tech Startups 3.0 here. The source of the statement is Marissa Mayer. In the article Ms. Mayer makes clear that Google is not chasing the natural language processing juggernaut. The article reported that Google can do semantics with Google’s “large amounts of data.” In my opinion Google is dragging a large, quite smelly red herring across this topic. If you are curious about Google’s interest in semantics, you may want to look at the five patent applications filed in February 2007 by Ramanathan Guha. You will need to brush up on Dr. Guha’s background; for example, he was involved in writing the W3C semantic documents, and his technology delivers what Google calls “context.” Ms. Mayer is separating Google’s approach to semantics from Microsoft’s approach. My thought is that Google’s method of communication is designed to keep Google the warm fuzzy company everyone used (not the tense) to love. I don’t buy this statement for a devalued US penny. What about you? If you can locate a copy, I contributed to an analysis of Google’s semantic technology published by Bear Stearns in 2007. Too bad the company is history. The report suggests that Ms. Mayer is doing some wordsmithing if the Tech Startup’s story is on the beam.
Stephen Arnold, November 27, 2008
Microsoft and Pricing
November 19, 2008
I saw a new story in Seattle Tech Report here that Microsoft is making is OneCare security service free. A short time later I came across Microsoft’s own news release about this pricing change here. Bundling or giving away services free is not a new idea in software. The notion is to give customers a taste and then sell them more has worked many times. In the Microsoft news release, the company says:
Windows Live OneCare will continue to be sold for Windows XP and Windows Vista at retail through June 30, 2009. Direct sales of OneCare will be gradually phased out when “Morro” becomes available. Regardless of their method of purchase, Microsoft will ensure that all current customers remain protected through the life of their subscriptions.
The marketing technique is little more than shareware or freeware with a catch.
Then I remembered that Microsoft was reducing prices for its Dynamics products. The prices for its cloud services for Exchange and SharePoint were quite competitive as well. Even the Zune, according to CNet news is getting new features and a lower price. You can read “Microsoft Chopping Zune Prices” here.
The question I asked myself, “Will Microsoft’s price cutting and no fee initiatives extend to Microsoft Fast enterprise search?” My hunch is that the Fast ESP search technology may become more affordable in the months ahead. Here’s my reasoning:
- A number of high profile vendors have rolled out more robust content processing solutions that “snap in” to SharePoint. Examples range from Autonomy to Coveo to Exalead to Interse to ISYS to dozens of other vendors. Companies who want to “work around” SharePoint search problems have an abundance of options. Microsoft Fast may have to use severe price cuts to keep customers from getting out of the corral
- As the economic noose tightens on organizations, some vendors may offer a two-fer deal; that is, sign up now, get one year free and pay only for the second year. This approach may be quite appealing in some organizations. In fact, in a recent review of Google prices for the US government, one could easily conclude that Google is keeping this option available to its resellers. The idea is to get shelf space or the camel’s nose into the tent.
- New players may be willing to install a proof of concept for little or no money. These upstarts may provide “good enough” solutions that allow an organization to solve a tough content processing problem without spending much money.
I see the present economic climate forcing some Darwinian actions and Microsoft Fast may have to move quickly or face escalating competition within the Microsoft ecosystem. After spending $1.2 billion for a Web part and a police raid, there may be some strategic pricing changes Redmond may have to consider to adapt to the present enterprise market for search and content processing. If you are a Microsoft champion, please, help me understand if my analysis is on track or off track. Use the comments section and bring along some facts, please. I have enough uninformed inputs from my pals Barry and Cyrus to last the winter.
Stephen Arnold, November 19, 2008
Autonomy: An Interview with Andrew Kanter
November 18, 2008
Andrew Kanter is the chief operating officer of Autonomy, a vendor of enterprise infrastructure and content processing systems, participated in the Search Wizards Speak series. Mr. Kanter addressed a number of topics in this wide ranging discussing, including the firm’s “meaning based computing” technology and the company’s move into cloud computing and hosted services. Autonomy was founded in 1996, but the company has been at the forefront of advanced content processing for more than a decade. Some analysts peg Autonomy as the world’s largest vendor of search systems in the world. The firm’s system is described as a “pan enterprise search platform” and incorporates technology that handles content automatically via the firm’s intelligent data operating layer or IDOL system.
Mr. Kanter said about the tough financial climate that is burdening some information system vendors:
Autonomy has closed some of the biggest deals in our history in recent months, reaching to $20 million, $70 million and more. These companies themselves often don’t know what’s happening within their own walls until it’s too late. In some ways it’s a sad truth but there is always going to be a demand for this type of [Autonomy] solution, whatever happens to the macroeconomic climate.
Mr. Kanter also talked about Autonomy’s ability to index audio and video content which is proliferating at some organizations. He said:
These days it’s very rare that we have a purely text-centric installation because we naturally communicate as human beings through rich forms of information such as voice and video. Autonomy’s IDOL is at the heart of our Autonomy Virage technology, applying the same conceptual analysis to audio and video content as to text. Further, even if demand today is only for text, most enterprises want to have the capability of including audio and video at a later date. They are bringing into their systems conference calls, webinars and other rich media content. In fact, we are seeing an increase in customers using our Autonomy Virage rich media solutions across all verticals. The strength of the platform approach is enable the architecture to evolve to accommodate the enterprise’s changing needs, without having to rip everything out.
You can read the complete interview with Mr. Kanter on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. Navigate to http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/ or click here to access the interview directly.
Stephen Arnold, November 18, 2008
Webinar: Open Standards and Semantic Technology
November 14, 2008
The economic downturn worldwide bodes poorly for dollars to add more search technologies to the enterprise, but the umbrella in the thunderstorm may be found in a movement quietly readying for a download launch. When will a standardized, semantic IT infrastructure be the basis of the enterprise’s entire IT framework for operations across all divisions?
There is a growing discussion in Europe, now spilling over into the US, regarding the SMILA project, the SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture. For more detail, click here or navigate http://eccenca.broxblogs.de. This open source solution is coming from a partnering of brox IT-Solutions, and empolis in Germany through Eclipse.org.
Semantic Technologies
Semantic technologies continue to gain in the discussion amongst researchers and companies investing in their own search frameworks across the organization because it is the unstructured data that remains the elephant in the room. There are proponents in several large IT companies that believe an answer is available in SMILA. When will a semantic IT infrastructure be the basis of the enterprise’s entire IT framework for operations across all divisions? Consider this white paper (in German-use translate.google.com) http://www.heise.de/open/Union-Investment-Integrationsplattform-auf-Basis-offener-Standards–/artikel/118395 The paper contends that:
“Open standards make applications more quickly realized and flawless.”
Eccenca is the commercial level version available for enterprise that is being deployed with professional services and support. At brox, the company is building commercial-grade architecture and applications for the enterprise under the Eccenca Foundation, based on the SMILA codebase. Eccenca products will reflect internal expertise of existing customer requests, including those of startups in Theseus, Volkswagen, and others. See more information in the response to this blog’s recent discussion (Nov.4th) at http://h3lge.de/weblog/. Eccenca.com and the first download of SMILA are anticipated in short order. At Eccenca.com, brox will set up and manage a marketplace for standard-based plug ins, solutions, and expertise.
Webinar
There is a webinar in English coming up to discuss this whole approach further, coming up on December 17, 2008. The seminar will run about one hour and take place at 8:00 am PDT / 11:00 pm EDT / 4:00 pm GMT. The seminar will be given by Georg Schmidt (brox IT-Solutions) and Igor Novakovic (empolis). The title of the webinar is “SMILA – SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture.” This webinar will present the SMILA project (emphasizing the integration possibilities), provide the status report about the latest project developments and give a short demonstration of currently implemented features.
The webinar will discuss the challenge of the amount and diversity of information is growing exponentially, mainly in the area of unstructured data, like emails, text files, blogs and images. Poor data accessibility, user rights integration and the lack of semantic metadata are constraining factors for building next generation enterprise search and other document centric applications. Missing standards result in proprietary solutions with huge short and long term cost. SMILA is an extensible framework for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise. Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources. Using the framework as their basis will enable developers to concentrate on the creation of higher value solutions, like semantic driven applications.
An article authored by Dawn Marie Yankeelov, president of ASPectx.
Google and Novel Content
November 13, 2008
On November 11, 2008, Google received a patent for the invention “Detecting Novel Content”, US7451120. In my opinion this is an important Google invention. The system and method makes it possible for Google to identify a segment of a document that contains interesting information. “Novel” is a code word for distinctive information. The abstract for the invention is:
A system determines an ordered sequence of documents and determines an amount of novel content contained in each document of the ordered sequence of documents. The system assigns a novelty score to each document based on the determined amount of novel content.
Let’s assume that Google uses this invention. What can the method deliver? My thought was a compilation of novel content on a user-specified subject. Traditional publishers cut and paste to create anthologies. In the 15th and 16th centuries books that were collections of snippets were used to teach students Latin and Greek. Another possible use of the method would be to snip content from one document and place that snippet and its metadata into a dataspace.
Stephen Arnold, November 13, 2008
ISYS:web 9 Now Available
November 11, 2008
A happy quack to the reader in Colorado who alerted me to the new release of ISYS Search Software Version 9.0. I had a pre release version, and I found that its speed and date features were particularly useful. According to ISYS Search Software:
ISYS:web 9 offers customers several major enhancements, all designed to deliver the speed, efficiency and accuracy required to find information fast. More importantly, ISYS has expanded its content mining capabilities using predictive and reliable methods that help customers better understand their content. Through its Intelligent Content Analysis, ISYS notes key characteristics about a content collection, such as metadata patterns and entities, and leverages these facets in the interface to provide a more fluid search and discovery process.
Among the new features are:
- Intelligent Query Expansion. Designed to give users greater context and avenues to pursue, Intelligent Query Expansion offers suggestions based on your query and the document. For example, a search for “SharePoint” might suggest “SharePoint search web part.”
- ContextCogs are snippets of relevant and contextual information pulled from third-party sources and displayed alongside standard ISYS results. When a search is executed, the query is also passed to each registered Cog, which could include enterprise-level applications, Internet search engines or Active Directory Contacts.
- Intelligence Clouds enable rapid navigation of key information. The tag cloud appears as a collection of search terms and phrases, with the various terms shown in larger or smaller fonts depending on their density within the index.
- Improved Performance and Scalability. ISYS:web handles most search requests concurrently with a higher throughput. Additionally, we’ve increased index capacity from 24 gigabytes to 384 gigabytes per index. With indexed data representing, on average, 10 to 20 percent of the total data size, ISYS can now index two to four terabytes of information per index.
- Search Form Customization. ISYS now offers both automatic and custom designed search forms. For automatic search forms, users point the wizard at their indexes and ISYS creates a search form automatically by analyzing the content and structure of the information. ISYS also offers a point-and-click method for creating forms for searching structured information.
- Index Biasing. ISYS told me that the company wanted to enhance ISYS:web’s tuning capabilities. “Tuning” in this context means giving administrators with the ability to adjust the weighting on entire collections of documents. This option enables an organization to further tune relevance to suit specific situations; for example, boost specific content across result sets.
- De-Duplication. ISYS automatically identifies identical documents and either removes them from the results or visually marks them. This capability is of particular importance to legal professionals conducting discovery work, or any user attempting to conduct analysis of a given content collection
- ISYS:web Federator allows customers to federate their searches across both ISYS and non-ISYS content sources. ISYS:web displays results from each source separately, allowing users to navigate between the sets of results without compromising relevance.
- Exchange Indexing. Particularly important for responding in a timely manner to discovery requests, ISYS:web enables administrators to centrally create and manage individual indexes for each user’s email account. Administrators can also opt to make these indexes available to end users, relying on Active Directory permissions to ensure users can only search the email indexes for which they are authorized.
I ran several queries on the new system. You can read about my tests and examine a sample screen shot here. In my April 2008 study for the Gilbane Group, I identified ISYS Search Software as a “company to watch.” In fact, I highlighted the company in lecture about enterprise search in 2009 here. For more information about the company, navigate to the ISYS Search Software Web site here. You can download a trial version of the software here. If you want to get a flavor for the company’s commitment to search, you may find the interview I conducted with Ian Davies, founder of ISYS Search Software a way to understand the firm’s approach to information access. I conducted the interview in March 20008, but it is quite relevant today (November 11, 2008).
Stephen Arnold, November 11, 2008
Interview with Martin White, Intranet Focus Ltd.
November 11, 2008
Martin White, co author of Successful Enterprise Search Management (Galatea, November 28, 2008), spoke with Stephen Arnold (his co-author) about the new Galatea study about search management. The interview touches upon the challenges that organizations face with information access, including search. The new study, which becomes available on November 28, 2008, tackles subjects that have not been discussed in terms of management, return on investment, and problem solving. Mr. White said:
Very rarely is poor search a result solely of poor technology. It is all about effective management of the entire search procurement, installation and implementation processes.
On the subject of business intelligence–what some pundits are calling “smart search” or “active intelligence”–Mr. White said:
Look at all those financial institutions with their BI applications. Did it stop them making a fool of themselves and us over sub-prime loans. BI is only as good as the way in which the correlations are set up and usually that is poorly. To me the new search is when search is all but invisible – embedded in a workflow process.
You can read the full text of this interview, conducted on November 10, 2008 here.
About the Study
The scope of the new study Successful Enterprise Search Management is unusual. Most studies of search are little more than profiles of vendors. After more than one year of work, Mr. White’s and his co-author’s approach is to approach the management aspect of search, information access and content processing by putting a conceptual foundation in place, reviewing the technology of search, discussing the vendor selection process, exploring the implementation stage, including pre launch testing of the system, and a series of suggestions called “action this day.”
The book includes case studies, references to specific vendors’ systems, and practical guidance from Mr. White and his co-author. Specific topics addressed include text mining and advanced content processing, information governance, and the challenges language itself presents. The book consists of five major sections and 17 chapters. The book is illustrated with screenshots from referenced systems and diagrams that highlight the management tasks addressed.
You can learn more about the book and place a pre-publication order on the Galatea Web site here.
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