The Search Conference Wars
November 24, 2010
I was in Washington, DC last week for the Mark Logic Government Summit. I estimated that there were between 450 and 550 people at the Tyson’s Corner-area event.
I learned from a colleague at a conference across town that there were 1,200 people at the Information Today multi-part search, knowledge management, and digital everything conference at the Renaissance Center in the District of Columbia.
Sys-Con’s “Endeca Government Summit: Important Context on a Key Mission Area” reported:
The Endeca Government Summit was yesterday. The agenda included some fantastic presentations from customers who have used Endeca to address issues requiring incredible scale (billions of records) and incredible scope (including the need to discover meaning in data in milliseconds) and human-focused interfaces (including, in every solution I saw, an ability to enable humans to interact with data in ways that search never enables).
I heard that there were “hundreds” at the Endeca event.
I don’t doubt that the encomia in the Sys-Con write up is accurate. The Mark Logic Conference was excellent, but I was a captive participant and anything in which I get involved looks great from my vantage point. I think Mark Logic’s speaker line up from the military was more timely than Endeca’s but that’s my opinion.
The Information Today event yielded little feedback, and I assume that like its other conferences, the Information Today event was like previous Information Today events.
My views on these competing events are as follows:
- Vendors definitely like to target November for conferences
- Stacking up search and content processing conferences at about the same time is like the medieval practice of grouping shoe makers on the same street
- There must be a heck of a lot of people in Washington, DC with an unquenched thirst for information about finding information.
What’s this tell me?
I think there will be more piling on. An anchor conference—say, for instance, the Information Today road shows with their predictable line up of topics and speakers—pulls attention to a window of time. Then the savvy vendors target a conference at the same time, offering possibly more compelling programs. The result is a conference competition.
Who wins?
My view is that the magnet conference is carrying much of the marketing cost burden. Once the anchor event publicizes what it is doing, it becomes somewhat easier for other organizers to offer another venue to customers and prospects.
What happens when the magnet loses some of its pulling power? Interesting question. For now, the conference wars are minor skirmishes in the fight for the hearts and minds of information access. What’s ahead? Interesting question.
Stephen E Arnold, November 24, 2010
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OpenText Turns to an Oracle
November 23, 2010
According to a news story in IT Channel, Open Text has worked a deal to integrate more closely with Oracle. “Open Text et Oracle renforcent leur partenariat” said:
Open Text has a technological license and of specific distribution for Oracle Universal Online Archive Content Management SDK which enables him to embark Oracle technology in its solutions. Open Text will be able to optimize the integration of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and other functionalities of the Oracle platform.
Open Text has been taking some heat from Autonomy and Mark Logic. Both companies have demonstrated an ability to compete in markets where Open Text has gained traction. Open Text’s angle seems to be “information governance”, which I find a somewhat nebulous concept.
Open Text, as you know, has a pushcart filled with search technology. The properties are mostly stand alone; for example, the SGML search function dating from Tim Bray’s tenure, Fulcrum, BRS, IDI Basis, the Nstein tools, and other bits and pieces from the various acquisitions. I think RedDot arrives with an Autonomy stub.
Will this tie up work? Both Autonomy and Mark Logic have more refined marketing and sales methods. Open Text will have to innovate, and I am not sure that Oracle’s middleware or database will provide much more than a license to hunt for deals among organizations with Oracle database administrators eager to protect their sinecures.
Stephen E Arnold, November 23, 2010
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Search Vendors and Mad Men
November 8, 2010
What’s on the horizon for search and content processing companies? When it comes to marketing, there are changes afoot. I want to highlight some marketing methods that don’t work too well and identify three that seem to be working for certain vendors. Azurini, take note. Some of these methods involve your selling contacts in the guise of objective analysis. Believe it or not, you are now more Madison Avenue than most professionals understand.
My hunch is that you, gentle reader, are immersed in the excitement of every day life. You get a paycheck or send an invoice to a sugar daddy client. Life is reasonably good. Just don’t peer too far down the Road to Tomorrow is my advice.
Who can omit the lucky individuals who have to meet payroll, keep vulture capitalists high in the sky, and cope with the Peter Principle experience a different type of thrill. That thrill is the adrenaline rush of avoiding failure, ridicule, and becoming a bit on the Colbert Report.
As the search and content processing sector limps toward 2011, the challenge of generating big revenue looms larger. Maybe the proposed $600 billion in borrowed dollars will turn the trick?
Here’s what I have observed in 2010 about marketing search and content processing systems. These activities seem to be less effective than they were a year or two ago.
- Web site traffic. Vendors get really defensive when one looks at the traffic to search vendors’ Web sites. I know the usage states are wrong, but the data do indicate general trends. The trend I see is that traffic to the top 50 search and content processing vendors I track more closely than the 250 I monitor via Overflight is that Web site traffic is not so hot. Our review showed most Web sites have fewer uniques than this Web log. Run your own tests at www.compete.com. The situation is probably going to get worse in 2011, so that investment may not deliver a pay back beyond brochureware a person may stumble upon despite Google Instant.
- Web logs. These are not working. My Overflight system makes it dead easy to spot vendors with Web logs and the poor track record in updating the content with new posts and corrections. Blogs seem so easy to do, yet are beyond the reach of most search and content processing companies. Consulting firms like 451 and Gartner benefit because their services shift the content burden and the traffic acquisition from the search vendor to the marketing “experts”.
- Big trade show booths. Wow, these are expensive. One vendor told me that qualified sales leads are difficult to find at trade shows. Some types of events do work, but the 1980s style approach is a bit like wearing spurs when I drive a rental car.
- Terminology. I am not sure what some vendors are selling. The buzzwords are an effort to communicate. Most of the explanations from vendors are so similar I could cut and paste paragraphs from different collateral and most people would not notice. How about “information optimization” or “business intelligence”. So easy to say. So fuzzy today.
DBSight: More Grief for the Commercial RDBMS Dinosaurs
October 25, 2010
On a phone call last week, the participants were annoyed at the baked in enterprise database. Each upgrade cycle, several of the participants reported that their companies just “paid the bill.” Habit, not critical thinking, keeps some of those giant IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle RDBMS installations pump cash from clients into the corporate coffers.
I learned that DBSight is now at Version 4.x (a J2EE search platform) on the call. I first wrote about the system in April 2008 in “DBSight Search: Worth a Closer Look”. The system offers full text search for information stuffed into relational databases. The system can integrate with other languages via XML, JSON, and HTML. The description was that DBSight included a built in database crawler. The system provided a number of knobs and dials. I noted down such functions as faceted search, support for word lists, multi-threaded searching, and some other goodies. In order to handle big data, the system supports multiple indexes and sharded search as well as a number of other speed up methods.
The company coding DBSight has been around since 2004. DBSight has been engineered as a “re-usable search platform.” License fees begin at about $200 but there is a community edition available from this page. If you want an enterprise license, DBSight will provide a custom price quote. I did some poking around and located a link for a free download at http://www.dbsight.net/index.php?q=node/47.
Could an enterprising coder combine some other bits and pieces and create a system that delivers some of the Blue Stream or MarkLogic functionality?
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2010
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FileNet: An Agile CMS with Search and More?
October 4, 2010
We have been working on a new Web log. The reason I listened to the Floss podcast about the open source content management framework Plone was to get a sense of the threat open source content management systems (CMS) pose to big outfits like IBM. IBM and its ilk assert that their software is really a platform, a framework, an architecture. I am not 100 percent convinced.
What makes IBM interesting is that the company has already shifted from its raft of home grown and partner search solutions to open source search. The last time I poked around the innards of OmniFind 9.x, it looked like Lucene, walked like Lucene, and said open source like Lucene. I, canny goose that I am, concluded that OmniFind was open source.
Would it remain open source? Would IBM pull an Oracle Java “move”, allowing lawyers to be innovators? Would those folks who paid big bucks for the FileNet system that once snarfed down paper checks for at least one bank with which I worked be stuck with a big dinosaur?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I can summarize – before I forget them – the points that I captured in a short discussion I had with a client last week. Summer is sure over. Lots of 30 year olds seem to be coming to the goose pond for what I told the president of MarkLogic was a consultation with the goose-ru. I am not a guru, of course.
The points:
First, the current IBM description of FileNet says here that:
FileNet® P8 Platform is a next-generation, unified enterprise foundation for the integrated FileNet P8 products. It combines the enterprise content management reference architecture with comprehensive business process management and compliance capabilities. FileNet P8 addresses the most demanding compliance, content and process management needs for your entire organization. It is a key element in creating an agile, adaptable ECM environment necessary to support a dynamic organization that must respond quickly to change. Agile ECM solutions using IBM technologies bring together capabilities for process management, content management, regulatory compliance and legal discovery. [Emphasis added]
The summary is quite comprehensive. One point omitted from this Web page is the fact that FileNet dates from 1982. My math is not too good, but I think that is more than 20 years ago. As a result, I wondered about the reference to “agile.” At age 66, I am not agile, and I am not sure that two decade old software is as spry as the Plone team’s product. Just my preliminary opinion, gentle reader. Your opinion may differ.
From the Red Book. I suppose one could describe this as an agility engine. Notice the components and the dependence on the tough and expensive to scale traditional RDBMS. Copyright IBM 2010.
Second, FileNet was an early Brainware. The idea was to suck in paper, allow the trained FileNet specialists to monitor the system, and then output reports. My first exposure to FileNet was at a check clearing operation in Manhattan. Lots of people worked from sundown to sunrise processing paper checks. When the math no longer worked, that bank shipped the work first to Puerto Rico and then to Asia. I think the bank went south, sunk in part by financial managers’ acrobatics and the economic downturn. There is a lot of money to be made is manipulating paper documents. The Brainware twist, as well as other 21st century solutions, is to manipulate paper and digital content and make the results useful within a work flow. Brainware’s method relies on its trigram technology. I am not sure whether the heart of a 1982 architecture beats deep within the FileNet construct, but my hunch is that change comes slowly to large systems nurtured in the IBM $100 billion in revenue environment. My last check on Brainware revealed that Oracle, one of IBM’s competitors, has been relying on Brainware for some paper and data tricks. One rumor which I will try to substantiate when I meet with an informed source on October 12, 2010, is that Brainware and Oracle have been winning sales from IBM FileNet. If so, will Oracle put on the pressure? Will IBM be able to spiff up a 20 year old system? I don’t know.
Third, my recollection is that FileNet has become an umbrella product for IBM. The original FileNet is probably still remembered with some fondness, but today FileNet touches upon technologies rolled into FileNet before IBM paid $1.6 billion for the company in 2006. The various technologies within the FileNet wrapper include /.MS, search, and almost anything one would require to build a complete information platform. If you want to dig into the product, download the 300 page Redbook.
You can also sign on for services, which seems to be the reason agile FileNet exists in my opinion:
- Content Manager OnDemand Conversion Services
- Disaster Recovery Services
- FileNet P8 Conversion Services
- FileNet Report Manager Conversion Services
- Health Check Services
- Media Migration Services
- Mobius to Content Manager OnDemand Conversion Services
- Packaged Implementation Services
- Platform Conversion Services
- Remote System Administration
- System Management Services
- Transition Services.
Now some questions:
- With a system as “agile” and extensible, why did IBM sign on a bunch of CMS partners. One example was Documentum, which is now owned by rival EMC. i recall that there were some exciting deployment activities with an IBM Documentum system when I was poking around the US Senate. But why sign on for another super complex, aging CMS when FileNet was tan, ready, and rested, just like Nixon in one of his election bids?
- Why would IBM be sort of open source in search and proprietary in the core platform? There is a modern framework available; for example Plone? IBM dumped proprietary search, so won’t IBM dump FileNet? What’s good for the search goose should be good for the CMS gander.
- With the revenue for FileNet focused on services, particularly migration and conversion services, isn’t there more revenue to be had by swapping in a more modern system and then charging to move customers off the 20 year old FileNet platform and then selling more Web savvy, cloud centric, and flexible solutions?
I think this product will be interesting to watch for three reasons:
First, the Brainware success is going to inspire other companies to go after these hugely complex, expensive legacy systems. I think with CMS is not just disarray but full scale marginalization, the sector will undergo some additional change.
Second, I think that under the present financial pressure, IBM is going to turn up the heat on the lucky MBA who is supposed to grow the FileNet revenue. That will be a fun job and one that a 66 year old goose will find interesting to observe. Big information technology is a concept under scrutiny, and I think the IBM business unit with this product will be subject to some media attention, particularly in the banking and financial services trade press and blogs.
Third, the age of systems positioned as agile strikes me as the product of a marketing sensibility better tuned to writing about the troubles at Digg.com and Yahoo.com. But if IBM says, FileNet is agile, it has more than one billion reasons to tell that story.
To sum up, hello, Plume, Squiz, and the dozen other open source solutions. Maybe IBM should just buy Brainware and try again? Obviously there will be English majors, second and third tier consultants (the azurini), and probably journalist involved in FileNet’s battle against open source CMS. Today Plone looks good to me, however. And when I think of a framework for today’s information challenges, I am not sure that IBM or any of the other brand name enterprise vendors have what customers want: low cost, flexibility, and painless scaling.
Agile! Amazing.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2010
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Document Intelligence: A New Buzz Word for Search?
September 22, 2010
Brainware every couple of years discovers me. When this happens, the Brainware marketing team wants to meet. I think I will be catching up with the company at an upcoming intel conference. In the meantime, Brainware has rolled out “document intelligence.” The idea of smart content has spawned a conference, fueled the growth of MarkLogic, and now become part of the Brainware offering.
Brainware Inc. has three new modules, and they are set to reveal them at Oracle OpenWorld 2010, later this year in San Francisco, California. On the presentation schedule are Brainware Distiller, Globalbrain and Visibility modules. Touted as being one one of the world’s pre-eminent business-to-business technology exhibitions, demonstrations and theatre presentations are scheduled throughout the event. If in attendance, be sure to witness first hand how Brainware Distiller, paired up with OPEX mailroom solutions can provide advanced mailroom functionality that will extract vital information from the front end, and then delivering valuable data throughout the enterprise with rapid performance.
“I look forward to this opportunity to meet with potential partners and clients,” said Carl Mergele, Chief Executive Officer at Brainware. “Our Distiller solution is unparalleled in its ability to extract data from unstructured documents and streamline vital business processes for Oracle users worldwide, and this event allows us to demonstrate Brainware’s unique capabilities to members of the Oracle community.”
This type of service suggests that companies still have a big paper problem, and integration remains an issue with native oracle tools. Decide for yourself and check the news release (which may go dark at any time) or navigate to the Brainware Web site.
Maybe more after the briefing? What’s interesting about Oracle is that it continues to generate intentionally or unintentionally chatter about a big search deal. What more could one want beyond Oracle Text, SES11g, and partners’ products?
Glenn Black, September 22, 2010
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Six Semantic Vendors Profiled
August 9, 2010
I saw in my newsreader this story: “Introducing Six Semantic Technology Vendors: Strengthening Insurance Business Initiatives with Semantic Technologies.” The write up is a table of contents or a flier for a report prepared by one of the azurini with a focus on what seems to be “life and non life insurance companies.”
For me the most interesting snippet in the advertisement was this sequence, which I have formatted to make more readable.
Attivio offers a common access platform combining unstructured and structured content [Note: one of Attivio’s founders has left the building. No details.]
Cambridge Semantics wants to help companies quickly obtain practical results [Note: more of a business intelligence type solution.]
Lexalytics has a ‘laser-focus’ on sentiment analysis. [Note: lots of search and content processing in a Microsoft centric wrapper.]
Linguamatics finds the nuggets hidden in plain sight. [Note: the real deal with a core competency in pharmaceuticals which I suppose is similar to life and non life insurance companies.]
MetaCarta identifies location references in unstructured documents in real-time. [Note: a geo tagging centric system now chased by outfits like MarkLogic, Microsoft, and lots of others]
SchemaLogic enables information to be found and shared more effectively using semantic technologies. [Note: I thought this outfit managed metatags across an enterprise. At one time, the company was focused on Microsoft technology. Today? I don’t know because when one of the founders cut out, my interest tapered off.]
The list and its accompanying prose are interesting to me for three reasons:
First, the descriptions of these firms as semantic does not map to my impression of the six firms’ technologies. I am okay with the inclusion of Cambridge Semantics and Linguamatics but I am not in sync with the azurini who plopped the other four outfits in the list. I think I can dredge up an argument to include these four firms on a content processing list, but gung-ho semantic technology. Nope.
Second, the link pointed me to a reseller of market research. The hitch in the git along for me was that the landing page did not point to the report. When I ran a query for “semantic technology vendors” I saw this message: “Sorry, no reports matching your search were found. For personal search assistance, please send us a request at contact@aarkstore.com.”
Third, the source of the report did not jump off the page at me. In short, what the heck is this document? How much does it cost? How can anyone buy it if the vendor’s search system doesn’t work and the write up on the Moso-technology.com Web site is fragmented.
I can’t recommend buying or not buying the report. Too bad.
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2010
Vivisimo Drifts to Integration and Services
June 29, 2010
I heard about Vivisimo’s Federal Day from a contact in Washington, DC. Like MarkLogic and many other organizations, a company sponsored conference can be more effective than a general purpose trade show. The vendors need qualified prospects, and I think that customer conferences with an open door policy for prospects is an important marketing angle for search and content processing vendors.
Vivisimo has not been on my radar. There has been executive churn which is often a sign that a company is in some flux. You can read about the event in the effusive write up in Vivisimo’s Web log Information Optimized. The story is “Vivisimo’s Federal Day 2010.” The line up of speakers struck me as eclectic, and I am not sure how much search and content processing focus the presentations had. The notion of “information optimization” strikes me as azure chip consultant speak. The phrase is ambiguous. I am not sure what information is, so it is tough for me to know how to optimize something I don’t understand. But I was not there, so hopefully Vivisimo will post the PowerPoint decks or PDF versions of the notes.
Like other companies with roots in a search function, Vivisimo is working hard to find a way to get customers without falling into the “search is dead” quagmire. For me, the most telling comment in the article was:
By the end of the day, with the help of our customers and partners, we had explored the need, the theory and the practice behind Information Optimization. As Director of Product Management I have the benefit of hearing our customer stories daily, but many in attendance don’t have this luxury so it was a great pleasure to see their eye light up with possibilities when hearing each other’s stories. One of my favorite quotes of the day was when an analyst explained the value of their application as “finally it was like the lights were turned on.” The diversity of solutions shown by our customers drove home the enormous potential of this discipline, and the feedback we received will help drive the evolution of Vivisimo’s product and service offerings in the future. What a home run!
A home run is great. Winning for customers and stakeholders is the real yard stick in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2010
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Oracle Updates Its Enterprise Publishing System
May 25, 2010
I know that the world outside of Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, believes that Oracle is a database company. I have pointed out that the company has done its best to baffle geese like me, particularly with its search technology.
I wanted to call your attention to a news item that has not been picked up and bruited far and wide. The write up’s title is “Oracle Introduces Oracle Documaker 11.5.” The upgrade pushes Oracle into the rarified air breathed by Hewlett Packard, StreamServe, Mark Logic, and a handful of other companies.
Forget desktop publishing and Web content management. These systems and Oracle’s deliver industrial strength document generation from repositories, business logic, and assorted bells and whistles unheard by the InDesign crowd.
Among the new release’s features are:
- Support for Microsoft Word as an authoring tool
- A rules-based system so content can be repurposed
- Multiple output options, including hard copy and Web pages.
Will Exstream Software, InfoPrint (a brand new identify is coming and new features from what I hear), and Mark Logic roll over and die? Not likely, but Oracle seems to recognize that unless it defends this important segment, the company can lose and lose big.
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2010
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Hardware Extends SQL Size Boundaries
May 6, 2010
I know. There is the SQL crowd. And there is the NoSQL crowd. Don’t forget the shot gun marriage segment which marries SQL and NoSQL. Where do you think IBM and Oracle fall in this range of options? Part of the answer for IBM appears in “Power7 Blades: The i/DB2 Combo Versus AIX/Oracle”. The idea is simple. Traditional database technology can handle the peta- and exa-scale data management tasks. Well, that’s what the assumption is. The article points out that “In many cases, the premium that IBM is charging i For Business shops for configured Power7 blade servers is reasonable compared to what it costs to configure AIX and an Oracle database on the same identical blades.” The write up explains the pricing for IBM’s newest hardware for database. The assumption is that I would use IBM hardware for data management. The interesting part is that this write up could be edited to apply to Oracle’s latest hardware line up. In short, there is not much difference between these two companies’ approach to data management. The cost for licenses gets really big really fast. Take 64 cores, buy hardware, pay for software licenses, rinse, repeat. Big numbers, fast. The write up is important because it provides performance and cost figures. I downloaded the story and tucked it in my pricing folder.
The challenge to IBM and Oracle is that the cost of SQL solutions is going to hockey stick. What licensees need to ask are such questions as:
- What are the NoSQL or hybrid solutions’ cost? When considering alternatives, what happens to those licensing and cost costs?
- If SQL is assumed to the solution to data management woes, why are NoSQL and hybrid solutions becoming the methods in use at some outfits, ranging from the US government entities to commercial outfits?
- What are the additional costs for maintaining and tuning these hardware/software solutions from IBM and Oracle?
- My view is that SQL is assumed to be the right tool for today’s data management tasks. I am not so sure.
NoSQL specialists like Mark Logic have some interesting approaches. Hybrid outfits like Aster Data have interesting approaches. I find pure SQL solutions both less interesting and more trouble than the high price tags warrant. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2010
No one paid me to write this.
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