SurfRay Management
January 31, 2009
I did some poking around on Friday, January 30, 2008. One of the more interesting items was confirmation that SurfRay president Bill Cobb resigned from SurfRay earlier this month. There has been some chatter that he was forced out of the company. That’s not exactly on the money. I spoke with Mr. Cobb and he is interested in exploring leadership opportunities. With regard to the future of SurfRay, I can say with confidence that the company is indeed sailing in rough waters against a headwind. If an investment firm is poised to acquire the assets, that deal will have to be made quickly. In my opinion, time is running out for SurfRay.
Stephen Arnold, January 31, 2009
Semantic Universe Sighted
January 31, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to this Yahoo News story here about the Semantic Universe. According to Tony Shaw, Editor of Semantic Universe Network, “The semantic community needs a vehicle to communicate the comprehensive business applications and benefits of semantic technology, as well as a better way to connect developers, customers, entrepreneurs and investors. Semantic Universe Network will be that vehicle.” Sponsorship opportunities are available too. You can get additional information from the Web site here. The goslings at Beyond Search wish the information service well.
Stephen Arnold, January 31, 2009
Facebook and Twitter: Who Owns What
January 30, 2009
If a Facebook or Twitter fails, what happens? What a silly question. According to Jeremy Liew, Facebook is “pretty comfortable” about where the company is “right now”. You can find this statement and quite a bit of useful commentary in the article “Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business” here. For me the most important comment in the write up by Mark Glaser was:
If you are planning on using either Twitter or Facebook as a marketing platform for yourself or your business, be sure to read the Terms of Service carefully. That’s what Facebook’s Larry Yu advised when I talked to him. “The important thing for people to do is to review the Terms of Service,” he said. “A lot of people don’t do that. They don’t have experience with it, and we encourage people to do it…There are also terms for application developers. As people decide to develop on the platform, they have to be comfortable with those terms.”
This addled goose is wary of social networks. Some trophy generation denizens believe that they don’t exist unless providing information on these publishing platforms. The trophy kids want to “hook up” and keep their “friends” informed about their activities and where abouts. When one of the trophy kids becomes a person of interest to law enforcement, those social postings are going to be somewhat useful to certain authorities. I wonder if the trophy kids realize that some information which is innocuous at the time it becomes available might provide insights to a more informed thinker. Run a query for profiling and see what you think of that discipline. Finally, there’s a nifty tool called the Analyst’s Notebook. If you are not familiar with it, run a Google query for that puppy. From my point of view the information “in” social systems is fascinating. Technology is an interesting construct. The consequences of technology can be even more interesting. Think search, content processing, link analysis, clustering, and other useful methods crunching on those social data. Yum, yum.
Stephen Arnold, January 31, 2009
Exalead: Moving the Front Line
January 26, 2009
A happy quack to the reader in California who sent me an update on Exalead. In the last 10 days, I have received a steady flow of news. The company continues to make headway in the US market.
The company has announced CloudView OEM Edition 5.0. This is a version of the product that can be embedded in third- party applications. The product has been designed for independent software vendors and software as a service providers. The OEM edition includes performance improvements with tweaks to make embedding easier and quicker. The product, as I understand it, can be used to add search and sophisticated content processing functions to email, CMS, call center, and other information centric applications.
Paul Doscher, CEO of Exalead said:
As the use of traditional Web and Web 2.0 technologies including wikis, instant messaging, social networking, and collaboration has proliferated within the enterprise, users have come to expect the same simplicity, speed, and scale from their enterprise software providers. The challenge for ISVs is to provide that same experience in their search capabilities without sacrificing the security and precision required for enterprise use. Exalead CloudView OEM Edition helps them deliver on that challenge.
(Note: you can read an exclusive January 2008 Beyond Search interview with Mr. Doscher here.)
Features of the new product include:
- Ability to deal with petabytes of data
- Aggregation, collation, and normalization of data from disparate structured and unstructured sources; for example, HTML, Microsoft Office documents and other files scattered across corporate servers, data located at SaaS providers, active and archived e-mail, relational data, proprietary application data, etc.
- Support for fuzzy and precise relevancy
- Small CPU and disk footprints
- Scalability to handle spikes
- High peak user concurrency
- Support for existing interfaces, security models, and data source
- Multi language support.
In my April 2008 Gilbane Group report Beyond Search I highlighted Exalead’s architectural advantage. Based on my research, Exalead and Google tackle scaling and performance in somewhat similar ways. (Note: the founder of Exalead was a senior AltaVista.com engineer. You can read an interview with François Bourdoncle here.)
Microsoft-Nortel Parallel
January 23, 2009
Matthew Nickasch’s “Could Microsoft Become Another Nortel?” here is an article that would not have occurred to us in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. We don’t think too much about non search vendors and Nortel is not a player in the space we monitor. Microsoft is a search vendor. The company has Web search, various test search systems which you can follow here, Powerset (based on long standing Xerox technology), Fast Search & Transfer (a Web search company that morphed into enterprise search then publishing systems and now into conference management).
Mr. Nickasch picks up the theme of the layoffs at Microsoft that were triggered by the firm’s financial results reported in January 2009. For me, the most interesting comment in the article was:
Many large companies have much to learn from the recent events of Nortel, who filed for bankruptcy protection last week. Organizations with disjunct structures and complexly-integrated business functions need to critically evaluate their overall business structure.
I am not a fan of MBA speak, but I absolutely agreed with the use of the word “disjunct”. That is a very nice way of saying disorganized, confused, and addled (just like the goose writing this Web log). Nortel, once a giant, is now a mouse. A mouse in debt at that.
Three notions were triggered by Mr. Nickasch’s apt juxtaposition.
First, could this be the start of a more serious effort to break up Microsoft? Unlike Nortel (Canadian debt, government involvement, global competition), Microsoft could be segmented easily. Shareholders would get a boost from a break up in my view.
Second, what happens to orphans like big dollar acquisitions that have modest profile into today’s competitive enterprise market. I hear about SharePoint. I hear about Silverlight. I even hear about Windows Mobile. I don’t hear about ESP. In case you have forgotten, that’s not paranormal insight; that’s enterprise search platform.
Third, what’s the positioning of on premises software versus cloud software. Microsoft has quite a few brands and is at risk in terms of making clear what tool, system, service, and feature is associated with what product line.
In my opinion, I think Mr. Nickasch has forged a brilliant pairing. A happy quack to him.
Stephen Arnold, January 23, 2009
Mark Logic: A Lifesaver for Content Producing Organizations
January 23, 2009
Technology has to reduce costs, streamline product production, and deliver a competitive advantage. Without a payoff, the zippiest technology is not worth too much. Beyond Search casts a skeptical eye on technology that is disconnected from the real-world of today’s financial crises.
This week, the Beyond Search team was given a briefing about some interesting new functions and services for the Mark Logic platform. If you are not familiar with Mark Logic, click here to read an interview with the company’s senior manager, Dave Kellogg, or click here to access Mark Logic’s description of its next generation data management platform and content processing system. (The demos are quite useful by the way.)
What’s new?
First, Mark Logic has developed a MarkLogic Connector for SharePoint. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million SharePoint licenses in the world at this time (January 2009). Microsoft provides some basic tools, but for industrial strength content manipulation, the Mark Logic platform with its support industry standards like the XQuery language and Open XML adds beef to the anorexic SharePoint frame.
With the connector, an organization can move content automatically from SharePoint into the Mark Logic system. Once in the Mark Logic environment, the content can be sliced, diced, index, classified, and repurposed. In fact, once set up, the SharePoint system feeds content into an automated publishing system that is more agile than the multi million dollar enterprise publishing systems that IBM and Hewlett Packard are pushing on their customers.
Mark Logic’s SharePoint connector includes an added bonus. if a SharePoint system goes south, the content in the Mark Logic system can be made available to a rebuilt SharePoint system. The benefit is that Mark Logic adds an no-cost insurance policy for SharePoint. Although a solid product, SharePoint has idiosyncrasies and the Mark Logic platform, the new “active library mirroring”, and the “workflow integration” components give content producing organizations levers on which to boost their competitive advantage.
Think automation. Think cost control. Think product agility.
Second, Mark Logic Toolkit for Word is a new and much needed rework of a 25 year old technology. In the 10980s, publishing and content producing organizations used XyWrite III+ to provide writers with an environment. The writer would type into the XyWrite system. When the file was saved, XyWrite would perform important housekeeping functions automatically. For example, a newspaper company could ask a reporter to file using XyWrite. When the story was complete, XyWrite would insert the reporter’s name and title, insert standard tags, and include the typesetting codes so the story could flow into a DEC 20 ITPS publishing system or its equivalent. XyWrite was acquired by IBM and orphaned hundreds of publishing customers, including the US House of Representatives to name one.
Now Mark Logic has created a XyWrite for the 21st century. The idea is that a content producing organization can build an application with the MarkLogic Toolkit for Word. The application runs in Word. Since many professionals work exclusively in Word, almost any content task can be automated in part. The idea is to remove certain burdensome tasks like inserting metadata into a document, copying it to a specific location, and notifying a colleague that the draft is available for inclusion in another document. The Toolkit makes it possible to eliminate some of the human tasks in order to reduce content production delays and minimize errors introduced via repetitive tasks. Humans get tired. Software does not. If you want additional detail, click here.
Mark Logic interface for Word. © Mark Logic, 2009. Used with permission of Mark Logic.
Net Net
Beyond Search tracks innovations in data and information management. Mark Logic is an interesting company because it points the way content manipulation systems are moving; namely:
- Open standards and easy extensibility
- Practical functions that reduce the costs associated with content production and manipulation
- Support for applications that are–whether one likes or dislikes SharePoint and Word or not–the standard for certain organizational tasks.
The inclusion of a work flow component adds to the usefulness of the Mark Logic solution. We’re impressed. A happy quack to the engineering team at Mark Logic. Now, what’s next?
Stephen Arnold, January 23, 2009
New Google Study Announced
January 21, 2009
In July 2007, I vowed, “No more Google studies.” I was tired. Now I am just about finished with my third analysis of Google’s technology and business strategy. The two are intertwined. My publisher (Harry Collier, Infonortics Ltd.) has posted some preliminary information here about the forthcoming monograph, Google: The Digital Gutenberg. If you are curious how a Web search engine can be a digital Gutenberg, you will find this analysis of Google’s newest information technology useful. None of the information in this monograph has appeared in the more than 1,200 posts on this Web log, in my two previous Google studies, nor in my more than 200 publicly available articles, columns, and talks.
In short, the monograph will contain new information.
If you are involved in traditional media as a distributor, producer, content creator, aggregator, reseller, indexer, or user–you will find the monograph useful. You may get a business idea or two. If you are the nervous type, the monograph will give some ideas on which to chew. This study represents more than one year of research and analysis. I don’t pay much attention to the received wisdom about Google. I do focus almost exclusively on the open source information about Google’s technology using journal articles, presentations, and patent documents. The result is a look at Google that is quite different from the Google is an advertising agency approach that continues to dominate discourse. Even the recent chatter about Google’s semantic technology is old hat if you read my previous Google monographs. In short, I think this third study provides a solid look at what Google will be unveiling in the period between mid 2009 and the end of 2010. Here are the links to my two earlier studies.
- The Google Legacy. Describes how Google’s search system became an application platform. You know this today, but my analysis appeared in early 2005.
- Google Version 2.0. Explores Google’s semantic technology and the company’s innovations that greased the skids for applications, enterprise solutions, and disintermediation of commercial database publishers. A recent podcast broke the old news just a few days ago. Suffice it to say that most pundits were unaware of the scope and scale of Google’s semantic innovations. Cluelessness is reassuring, just not helpful when trying to assess a competitive threat in my opinion.
I don’t have the energy to think about a fourth Google study, but this trilogy does provide a reasonably comprehensive view of Google’s technical infrastructure. I know from feedback from Googlers that the information about some of Google’s advanced technology is not widely known among Google’s rank and file employees. Google’s top wizards know, but these folks are generally not too descriptive about Google’s competitive strengths. Most pundits are happy to get a Google mouse pad or maybe a Google baseball hat. Not me. I track the nitty gritty and look past the glow of the lava lamps. I don’t even like Odwalla strawberry banana juice.
Stephen Arnold, January 21, 2009
Conference Spam or Conference Prime Rib
January 21, 2009
I winnowed email over the weekend. I noticed what seemed to be an increasing amount of conference spam. I don’t want to name the offending conference organizers, but I think that traditional conference organizers must be feeling the pinch of the economic downturn. For example, I just learned that one conference outfit that asked me to give a talk wants me to pay several hundred dollars to publish my presentation. I ignored the request. Another outfit sent me a list of 10 reasons to attend a mobile conference in Barcelona. Hey, Barcelona is a great city, but in today’s economic environment, I am not buying my own ticket to Spain so I can learn about mobile phones. I can read some Web log posts and interact with people on this Web log. Another outfit has told me that I can learn about the future of enterprise search. Sorry. Enterprise search doesn’t have much of a future. The most successful companies are providing systems that mesh with work processes and deliver actionable intelligence or some other buzzword just not “enterprise search”. The recent pull out from the IDG Apple conference sent shock waves through the conference world. If Apple jumps to the CES 2010 show, what happens to Macworld? What about information conferences that try to cover multiple disciplines in the unruly world of digital data? Those puppies confuse the attendees and anger the exhibitors. What’s network attached storage have to do with eDiscovery and licensing news from Factiva? Answer: not much from an exhibitors’ point of view I opine.
There are some promising new conferences coming along. I am not including the “in crowd” meet ups that occur routinely in the San Jose – San Francisco corridor. The go to search meeting for 2009 seems to be the Infonortics’ Boston meeting. You can find information about that program here. I have a vested interest in this conference for three reasons:
- I roll out the findings from my most recent analyses of Google’s patent documents and technical papers. The period from April 2008 to the present has been Google’s most productive. Few know about Google’s broader technology thrusts outside of the Googleplex.
- I fund and oversee the Evvie Award. Named in honor of one of the leading online innovators, Ev Brenner, the award recognizes the best presentation developed for the conference. The judging panel’s criterion is to answer the question “Would Ev have liked the presentation?” The people making the value judgment typically include Sue Feldman (IDC), Liz Liddy (Syracuse University), and David Evans (Justsystems), among others. The recipient receives a modest cash honorarium and an equally modest trophy. The value is peer recognition at this important conference.
- I learn from speakers who “do” search and content processing. I don’t endure presentations from the exhibitors or the best friends of the conference organizer.
Infonortics, unlike some of the near-death and deadly dull conferences, limits the number of attendees. Register early or find yourself waiting for next year.
Stephen Arnold, January 21, 2009
Kazeon Chops eDiscovery Prices
January 21, 2009
You know that the white shoe world of legal eagles is preparing for a tough year when eDiscovery outfits cut their prices. Lawyers once spent like mad in the name of due diligence and maybe a little thought about billing. The clients would pay and pay and pay. After all, who wants to wear an orange jumpsuit on the TV news or be immortalized on a Web site marching off to court? Law firm customers — sorry, clients, a more upscale word — are pushing back. Big companies are taking some of the work back inside the company’s walls. The outputs go to law firms who will keeps costs within certain parameters (a fancy word to describe a budget). How do I know these changes are underway? Easy. I got a briefing from an eDiscovery vendor last week and that outfit told me that it was making headway against high end eDiscovery vendors. The issue was cost. Price seemed to be this company’s strategic weapon. Today (January 20, 2009) I read in Byte and Switch here that “Kazeon Cuts Costs of Entry Level eDiscovery”. Paul Travis reports that a company can jump into eDiscovery for as little as $10,000. Keep in mind that a perpetual license still costs $80,000 a year. For me, the most important comment in the article was:
…There are more than 100 e-discovery vendors and that more are expected to enter the market this year. The result has been customer confusion and “led to a customer demand for clarity around e-discovery products, and for full integration around the e-discovery workflow process.
With the LegalTech trade show looming, I expect more cost cutting announcements. I am assuming that the show takes place. Rumor has it that one Gartner content management show has been postponed (a big word for shut down). Cost is on a number of professionals’ radar and the pricing for eDiscovery systems will be one indicator of the robustness of the content processing services sector.
Stephen Arnold, January 21, 2009
IBM Lotus Notes: In the Cloud but Can I Find Emails
January 20, 2009
IBM’s Lotus Notes has been splashed across my trusty feedreader today (January 19, 2009). IBM is either kicking its Lotus Notes’s sales activity up a notch or the original Ray Ozzie program is undergoing a rebirth. The search function for Lotus Notes has been interesting. At Ziff Communications, we were early adopters of Lotus Notes. In the 1980s it was tough for me to locate a specific email. Last time I tried to locate emails and attachments in a Notes repository, the job was still tough two decades later. There were some specialized searching tools such as Grapevine. I am not sure if this system from Grapevine Technologies is still in business. Today, I can fire index Notes repositories with third party tools. These work pretty well until I have to dig out a Notes archive, figure out what is what, and then go through the indexing and searching fire drill.
Now Lotus Notes is going to the cloud. You can read the story in the Industry Standard here. According to Lincoln Spector, LotusLive provides a signal for the future of this “platform”. Mr. Spector writes in “IBM Shoots for the Cloud with LotusLive but Notes Pricing Is a Mystery”:
After a year of public beta under the name BlueHouse, LotusLive was officially announced Monday at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando. Users can sign up and start using two LotusLive services, Meetings and Events. Meetings integrates audio and video conferencing and costs $48 to $99 per month depending on the number of participants, or 25 cents per minute. Events is intended to help users manage and host an online conference. In addition to the actual conferencing, it also handles registration and other chores. Meetings costs $99 per month or 30 cents per minute per guest.
Like an infomercial, I am going to say, “Wait. There’s more.” IBM and SAP have teamed to make a “smarter workforce”, according to eWeek. Clint Boulton’s “IBM, SAP Ally on Alloy for Enterprise Collaboration here.” The new Alloy product combines Lotus Notes and SAP’s Business Suite. Now when two elephants with appetites for seven figure license deals team up, the result is going to be fascinating to watch.
The question that I had after reading these announcements was, “Okay, will I be able to search for a particular email and attachment in a way that is a marked improvement over the default string matching?” As the volume of email goes up, finding and managing email is particularly important.
There are third party tools from Wave Software here and Coveo who provide solutions. I can turn to Exalead, ISYS Search Software, and several other vendors for solutions as well.
But IBM is moving to the cloud with Lotus Notes, and I am not convinced that either IBM’s or SAP’s search and retrieval system is there yet. Announcements are fine, but when I need to locate an email, I want a low latency system that works. I don’t want to pay more money.
If anyone knows what I am missing with regard to findability, please, contribute a comment in the appropriate section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, January 20, 2009
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