Autonomy Mines Iron Mountain
May 16, 2011
I have written about Stratify in the three editions of the Enterprise Search Report which I wrote when “search” was hot, and in my Gilbane report named after this blog. Since late 2010, Stratify (originally named Purple Yogi which got some In-Q-Tel love in 2001) has gotten lost within Iron Mountain’s labyrinth of organizational tunnels. Now Iron Mountain seems to face significant financial, technical, business, and management challenges. The details of what Autonomy snagged are fuzzy, but based on the sketchy information that flowed to me since May 12, 2011, here’s what I have been able to “mine”:
Autonomy mines Iron Mountain for revenue, customer, and upsell “gold.” Image source: http://www.davestravelcorner.com/articles/goldcountry/article.htm
- Autonomy will get the archiving, eDiscovery, and online back up business of Iron Mountain
- No word on the fate of Mimosa Systems which Iron Mountain bought in early 2010. (My recollection is that Mimosa used a mid tier search solution obtained from a third party. I want to link Mimosa with dtSearch, but I may be mistaken on that point.)
- Autonomy will apply is well-honed management method to the properties. Expect to see Autonomy push ever closer to $1.0 billion in revenues, maybe this calendar year.
You can get some numbers from the news item “Autonomy Acquires Some Iron Mountain Digital Assets for $380 Million.”
Stratify’s technology was the cat’s pajamas years ago. More recently, the technology has lagged. Iron Mountain’s own difficulties distracted the company from its digital opportunities. My view is the Iron Mountain made an all to familiar error: Online looks easy but looks are deceiving.
Some of the former Web masters, failed “real” journalists, and self appointed search experts will enjoy the opportunity to berate Autonomy for its acquisitions and growth tactics, but I think those folks are wrong.
Autonomy does manage its acquisitions to generate stakeholder and customer value.
In fact, Autonomy’s track record with its acquisitions is, in my opinion, better than either Google’s or Microsoft’s. As for Endeca, that company has fallen behind Autonomy due to different management strategies and growth tactics. Don’t believe me?
Just look at Autonomy’s track record, top line revenue, profits, and customer base, not tweets from a yesterday thinker at a lumber-filled, pay to play meet up.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2011
Freebie.
Digital Reasoning Continues to Expand
May 16, 2011
Move over Palantir and i2 Ltd. Digital Reasoning is expanding due to its rapid growth. As reported in MSN’s “Digital Reasoning Introduces Federal Advisory Board,” the data analytics leader has created a board to guide its push into the federal market. We learned:
With the federal government’s increased focus on cloud computing, (Digital Reasoning’s) flagship product Synthesys® provides a unique Entity Oriented Analytics solution that enables government agencies to tap into the power of big data. The Advisory Board represents a team with unique insight into the requirements of Big Data, text analytics and intelligence solutions for government agencies.
The board members are: Gen. William T. Hobbins, who retired as Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe; Bob Flores, founder and president of Applicology Inc., who spent 31 years in the US intelligence community; Anita K. Jones, who managed the Department of Defense’s science and technology program; Capt. Nick Buck, who spent 15 years in National Security Space, including 10 years in the National Reconnaissance Office; and Mike Miller, currently president of M4 Associates and previously VP of Juniper Networks’ Public Sector Division where he was responsible for all business with Juniper’s Public Sector customers in the US. This kind of talent should be valuable guiding Digital Reasoning’s federal sector strategy.
We have tracked this Franklin, Tennessee, company since its inception. To get some insight into the firm’s approach, you may want to read these two interviews ArnoldIT.com, the owner of this news service, conducted with Tim Estes, the founder of Digital Reasoning. The February 2010 interview explores the core technology of the firm and how it differs from other vendors’ methods. The December 2010 interview probes the new version of the firm’s flagship technology.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2011
Freebie
Visualization Components
May 15, 2011
David Galles, of the Computer Science University of San Francisco, gives us a useful collection of visualization components in his “Data Structure Visualizations” list. The structures and algorithms addressed include the Basics, Indexing, Sorting, Heap-like Data Structures, Graph Algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and “Others.”
In his page discussing visualizations, Galles explains,
The best way to understand complex data structures is to see them in action. We’ve developed interactive animations for a variety of data structures and algorithms. Our visualization tool is written in JavaScript using the HTML5 canvas element, and run in just about any modern browser — including iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, and even the web browser in the Kindle! (The frame rate is low enough in the Kindle that the visualizations aren’t terribly useful, but the tree-based visualizations — BSTs and AVL Trees — seem to work well enough).
Galles also provides a tutorial for creating one’s own visualizations. Check it out if you’re wrestling with your own complex data structures. As search vendors thrash and flail, business intelligence looks like a promising market sector. Nothing sells business intelligence like hot graphics. Just ask Palantir.
Cynthia Murrell May 15, 2011
Google and Search
May 11, 2011
Over the last five days, I have been immersed in conversations about Google and its public Web search system. I am not able to disclose the people with whom I have spoken. However, I want to isolate the issues that surfaced and offer some observations about the role of traditional Web sites. I want to capture the thoughts that surfaced after I thought about what I learned in my face to face and telephone conversations. In fact, one of the participants in this conversation directed my attention to this post, “Google Panda=Disaster.” I don’t think the problem is Panda. I think a more fundamental change has taken place and Google’s methods are just out of sync with the post shift environment. But hope is not lost. At the end of this write up, I provide a way for you to learn about a different approach. Sales pitch? Sure but a gentle one.
Relevance versus Selling Advertising
The main thrust of the conversations was that Google’s Web search is degrading. I have not experienced this problem, but the three groups with whom I spoke have. Each had different data to show that Google’s method of handling their publicly accessible Web site has changed.
First, one vendor reported that traffic to the firm’s Web site had dropped from 2,000 uniques per month to 100. The Web site is informational. There is a widget that displays headlines from the firm’s Web log. The code is clean and the site is not complex.
Second, another vendor reported that content from the firm’s news page was appearing on competitors’ Web sites. More troubling, the content was appearing high in a Google results list. However, the creator of the content found that the stories from the originating Web site were buried deep in the Google results list. The point is that others were recycling original content and receiving a higher ranking than the source of the original content.
Traditional Web advertising depicted brilliantly by Ken Rockwell. See his work at http://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/compacts/sd880/gallery-10.htm
Third, the third company found that its core business was no longer appearing in a Google results list for a query about the type of service the firm offered. However, the company was turning up in an unrelated or, at best, secondary results list.
I had no answer to the question each firm asked me, “What’s going on?”
Through various contacts, I pieced together a picture that suggests Google itself may not know what is happening. One source indicated that the core search team responsible for the PageRank output is doing its work much as it has for the last 12 years. Googlers responsible for selling advertising were not sure what changes were going on in the core search team’s algorithm tweaks. Not surprisingly, most people are scrutinizing search results, fiddling with metatags and other aspects of a Web site, and then checking to see what happened. The approach is time consuming and, in my opinion, very much like the person who plugs a token into a slot machine and hits the jack pot. There is great excitement at the payoff, but the process is not likely to work on the next go round.
Net net: I think there is a communications filter (intentional or unintentional) between the group at Google working to improve relevance and the sales professionals at Google who need to sell advertising. On one hand, this is probably healthy because many organizations put a wall between certain company functions. On the other hand, if Adwords and Adsense are linked to traffic and that traffic is highly variable, some advertisers may look to other alternatives. Facebook’s alleged 30 percent share of the banner advertising market may grow if the efficacy of Google’s advertising programs drops.
ZyLAB Audio Search
May 11, 2011
It’s like semantic search for audio files: Allvoipnews announces “ZyLAB Launches Audil Search Bundle.” The eDiscovery company’s product allows you to search your enterprise’s audio using speech analytics:
Company officials said that the desktop software product transforms audio recordings into a phonetic representation of the way in which words are pronounced. The investigators are able to search for dictionary terms, however also proper names, company names, or brands without the need to ‘re-ingest’ the data.
Kudos to ZyLAB. With this project, the company is pushing ahead of Microsoft Fast and Google. That’s no small feat. However, Exalead has offered audio and video search for several years.
Cynthia Murrell May 11, 2011
Military Could Benefit From Universal Translator App
May 3, 2011
According to the Wired.com article “Psst, Military” There’s Already A Universal Translator in the App Store” the US military hopes to get money from Congress to conduct research on the development of a universal translation device for soldiers in the field. “BOLT, the Boundless Operational Language Translation, will be so sophisticated it can understand foreign slang. Robust Automatic Translation of Speech — yes, RATS — will know the difference between speech that needs translating and background noise to discard.”
However, the SpeechTrans App is available on the iPhone and iPad will “record a spoken phrase you want translated, choose your foreign language, and the app will speak it back to you, all while displaying both versions of your text on the screen.” Some might say that it lacks the overall sophistication and advancement of similar army systems but it is an extremely thorough translation program that is ready and available for soldiers to use right now when they need it most.
As an added bonus it costs a mere $19.99. Maybe the army should look in the app store before its next million dollar research project. The Apple App Store claims to have an app for any and everything, and looks like it does. I think online searchers may benefit as well.
April Holmes, May 3, 2011
Freebie
Exalead Embraces SWYM or “See What You Mean”
May 3, 2011
In late April 2011, I spoke with Francois Bourdoncle, one of the founders of Exalead. Exalead was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in 2010. The French firm is one of the world’s premier engineering and technology products and services companies. I wanted to get more information about the acquisition and probe the next wave of product releases from Exalead, a leader in search and content processing. Exalead introduced its search based applications approach. Since that shift, the firm has experienced a surge in sales. Organizations such as the World Bank and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (IBM) have licensed the Exalead Cloudview platform.
I wanted to know more about Exalead’s semantic methods. In our conversation, Mr. Bourdoncle told me:
We have a number of customers that use Exalead for semantic processing. Cloudview has a number of text processing modules that we classify as providing semantic processing. These are: entity matching, ontology matching, fuzzy matching, related terms extraction, categorization/clustering and event detection among others. Used in combination, these processors can extract arbitrary sentiment, meaning not just positive or negative, but also along other dimensions as well. For example, if we were analyzing sentiment about restaurants, perhaps we’d want to know if the ambiance was casual or upscale or the cuisine was homey or refined.
When I probed about future products and services, Mr. Bourdoncle stated:
I cannot pre-announce future product plans, I will say that Dassault Systèmes has a deep technology portfolio. For example, it is creating a prototype simulation of the human body. This is a non-trivial computer science challenge. One way Dassault describes its technology vision is “See-What-You-Mean”. Or SWYM.
For the full text of the April 2011 interview with Mr. Bourdoncle, navigate to the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak subsite. For more information about Exalead, visit www.exalead.com.
Stephen E Arnold, May 3, 2011
No money but I was promised a KYFry the next time I was in Paris.
New Spin for OmniFind: Content Analytics
May 2, 2011
IBM has dominated my thinking with its bold claims for Watson. In the blaze of game show publicity, I lost track of the Lucene-based search system OmniFind 9.x. My Overflight system alerted me to “Content Analytics Starter Pack.” According to the April 2011 announcement:
The Starter Pack offers an advanced content analytics platform with Content Analytics and industry-leading, knowledge-driven enterprise search with OmniFind Enterprise Edition in a combined package. IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search empowers organizations to search, assess, and analyze large volumes of content in order to explore and surface relevant insight quickly to gain the most value from their information repositories inside and outside the firewall.
The product allows IBM licensees to:
- Find relevant enterprise content more quickly
- Turn raw text into rapid insight from content sources internal and external to your enterprise
- Customize rapid insight to industry and customer specific needs
- Enable deeper insights through integration to other systems and solutions.
At first glance, I thought IBM Content Analytics V2.2 was one program. I noticed that the OmniFind Enterprise Edition 9.1 has one set of hardware requirements at http://goo.gl/Wie0X and another set of hardware requirements for the analytics component at http://goo.gl/5J1ox. In addition, there are specific software requirements for each product.
The “new” product includes “improved support for content assessment, Cognos® Business Intelligence, and Advanced Case Management.”
Is IBM’s bundling of analytics and search a signal that the era of traditional search and retrieval has officially ended? Base image source: www.awesomefunnyclever.com
When you navigate to http://goo.gl/he3NR, you can see the different configurations available for this combo product.
What’s the pricing? According to IBM, “The charges are unchanged by this announcement.” The pricing seems to be based on processor value units or PVUs. Without a link, I am a bit at sea with regards to pricing. IBM does point out:
For clarification, note that if for any reason you are dissatisfied with the program and you are the original licensee, you may obtain a refund of the amount you paid for it, if within 30 days of your invoice date you return the program and its PoE to the party from whom you obtained it. If you downloaded the program, you may contact the party from whom you acquired it for instructions on how to obtain the refund. For clarification, note that for programs acquired under the IBM International Passport Advantage Agreement, this term applies only to your first acquisition of the program.
Ducks and Alphas: Wolfram Alpha and DuckDuckGo Unite
April 25, 2011
“Wolfram|Alpha and DuckDuckGo Partner on API binding and Search Integration,” touts Wolfram Alpha’s own blog. Both organizations have brought something unique to the Search universe, so we’re interested to see what comes of this. Will it be more agile than a Google and Godzilla would? (Googzilla?)
Wolfram|Alpha’s Computational Knowledge Engine not only retrieves data but crunches it for you—very useful, if you phrase your query well. Play with that here.
DuckDuckGo’s claim to fame is that they don’t track us; privacy champions like that. A lot. The site provides brief info, say from a dictionary or Wikipedia, as well as related topics at the top of the results page. It’s also blissfully free of advertising clutter. Check that out here.
According to the Wolfram Alpha blog, they are combining the Wolfram|Alpha functionality with the DuckDuckGo search:
So what does this new partnership mean for you? If you are a DuckDuckGo user, you’ll start to notice expanded Wolfram|Alpha integration. DuckDuckGo will start adding more Wolfram|Alpha functionality and datasets based on users’ suggestions. If there’s a specific topic area you’d like to see integrated into DuckDuckGo, your suggestions are welcome.
And for developers, DuckDuckGo will maintain the free Wolfram Alpha API Perl binding. With that, you can integrate Wolfram|Alpha into your application. Keep in mind that InQuira and Attensity are “products” of similar tie ups.
We’ll enjoy watching the progress of this hybrid beast.
Cynthia Murrell April 25, 2011
Freebie
Is IBM Reshaping Its Approach to Enterprise Search?
April 25, 2011
IBM is a mysterious and baffling outfit to me. One day I get a call from eager IBMers panting to find out what I know about the vendors in enterprise search. content processing, and semantics. Then weeks, maybe months go by, before an IBM person emails me a message like “We’ve been really busy” or “We don’t have a very big budget but maybe you could talk for free”. The classic IBM input I had this year is from a person who agreed to participate in a Search Wizards Speak interview via email. Months after the deadline, I was told an excuse similar to those I heard when I was a freshman in college and a classmate was explaining that his mother and dog died on the same day.
A better search or a more complex guitar? Source: http://www.heirloomradio.com/history.htm
Imagine my surprise when I received a link to a story from Yomiuri Online. “Natural Language Analysis Software, IBM Japan” contained what may be an compass reading about IBM’s enterprise search strategy. In a nutshell, IBM may be hooking together a content analytics component with the Lucene based OmniFind Enterprise Edition 9.1. Instead of offering what I can download from Apache or Lucid Imagination, IBM has grafted on text analytics.
The product, which becomes available on April 26, 2011, in Japan. IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search mashes up text mining software and information retrieval software. For good measure, IBM includes natural language analysis technology.
The other shocker, if the person translating the article was accurate, is that IBM will compete aggressively on price. I am not sure how IBM prices its products in Japan, but the software could, for all practical purposes be free. IBM makes its money on hardware and services with services becoming increasingly important in my opinion.
The product will handle social content, the unstructured data that plagues customer service operations, and email, among other source and file types. The system classifies content and outputs analytics, which may mean anything from a simple frequency count to a more elaborate SPSS type of function. If prices are indeed low, my hunch is that the SPSS type horsepower will not be present in full royal wedding regalia.
Some questions:
- Will this approach make IBM a bigger contender in enterprise search? No. IBM may be trying to carve a new niche for itself but Autonomy and Exalead are already there.
- Will this play explain the role of Watson or what IBM is doing with the dozens of analytics companies it has acquired? No.
- Is this a new trend in enterprise search? No.
- Will IBM continue to make sales to organizations who want to “go IBM”? Yep.
Vendors have been trying to distance themselves from the word “search” for years. In a sense, IBM is just late to the party. But with its financial resources and clout, tardiness may not matter.
Stephen E Arnold, April 25, 2011
Freebie unlike IBM professional services or a technical roll for a FRU.
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