HP, Autonomy, and a Context Free Expert Output about Search: The Bet on a Horse Approach to Market Analysis
May 4, 2013
I don’t think too much about:
- Azure chip consultants. You know, these are the firms which make a living from rah rahs, buzzwording, and pontification to sell reports. (I know. I labored at a non-azure chip outfit for what seems like decades. Experience is a good instructor. Oh, if you are a consultant, please, complain about my opinion using the comments section of this free blog.)
- Hewlett Packard. I recall that the company used to make lab equipment which was cool. Now I think the firm is in some other businesses but as quickly as I latch on to one like the Treo and mobile, HP exits the business. The venerable firm confuses my 69 year old mind.
- Autonomy. I think I did some work for the outfit but I cannot recall. Age and the lifestyle in rural Kentucky takes a toll on the memory I admit.
Nevertheless, I read “HP’s Autonomy Could Face Uphill Battle In Data Market.” There were some gems in the write up which I found amusing and illustrative of the problems which azure chip consulting firms and their experts have when tackling certain business issues.
The main idea of the write up for “investors” is that HP faces “challenges.” Okay. That’s a blinding insight. As you may recall, HP bought Autonomy for $11 billion and then a few months later roiled the “investors” by writing off billions on the deal. That was the mobile phone model, wasn’t it?
The write up then pointed out:
HP wanted Autonomy to jump-start its move into software and cloud-based computing. Autonomy is the No. 1 provider of search and retrieval software that companies use to find and share files and other information on their websites and document management systems.
Okay. But that too seems obvious.
Now here comes the kicker. The expert outfit providing inputs to the reporter doing the bull dog grip on this worn out bone is quoted as saying:
“Software license revenue (in this market) isn’t growing at the same rate as before, and we are beginning to see the rise of some new technologies, specifically content analytics and unified information access,” Schubmehl said. These new types of software can be used with types of business analytics software, business intelligence software and other software to help enterprises do a better job of locating specific information, he says, which is the job of search retrieval software.
I don’t know much about IDC but what strikes me from this passage is that there are some assertions in this snippet which may warrant a tiny bit of evaluation.
Will context free analyses deliver a winner? Will there be a Gamblers Anonymous for those who bet on what journalists and mid tier (second string) consultancies promulgate? For more about Gamblers Anonymous navigate to http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/ga/
Here goes:
Oracle Sees Cuts as the Hands of Startup Rivals
April 18, 2013
Oracle is a company that has made a name for its self in information storage, primarily databases, and ranks third in the country as a software makers behind only Microsoft and IBM. But the tables may be turning for Oracle. Read how in the article, “Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals.”
The article sums up the issue:
“Something is seriously wrong in Larry Land. Oracle does not command absolute control like it once did. You can see this clearly with the earnings the company posted last week and the growth that startups like Datastax are witnessing as more customers seek alternative databases for online applications.”
Startups are indeed taking a chunk out of the proprietary vendor market. Not only is this a trend in the world of content storage and management, but also in terms of enterprise search. SharePoint is the solution that developers and users are least excited about. Instead, talk turns to the up and coming open source initiatives that are more scalable, efficient, intuitive, and cost-effective. Take LucidWorks for instance. Not only does it provide open source based enterprise search on par with any proprietary solution, but it boasts award winning support and training and the power of Apache Lucene/Solr. Most companies are seeing open source value-added software as a no-brainer solution to their information needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Temis and MarkLogic: Timid? Not on the Semantic Highway
April 12, 2013
My in box overfloweth. Temis has rolled out a number of announcements in the last 10 days. The company is one of the many firms offering “semantic” technology. Due to the vagaries of language, Temis is in the “content enrichment” business. The idea is that technology indexes key words and concepts even though a concept may not be expressed in a text document. I call this indexing, but “enrichment” is certainly okay.
The first announcement which caught my attention was a news release I saw on the Marketwatch for fee distribution service. The title of the article was “TEMIS Completes Successful Wide Scale Semantic Content Enrichment Test in Windows Azure.” A news release about a test struck me as unusual. The key point for me was that Temis is positioning itself to go after the SharePoint add in market.
The second announcement was a news story distributed by Eureka Alert called “Wiley Selects Temis for Semantic Big Data Initiative The key point is that a traditional publishing company has licensed software to do what humans used to do in a venerable publishing company which, until recently, was sticking with traditional methods and products. Will Temis propel John Wiley to the top of the leader board of professional publishers? Hopefully some information will become available quickly.
The third announcement which I noted was “Temis and MarkLogic Strengthen Strategic Alliance.” The write up hits the concepts of semantics and big data. Here’s the passage which intrigued me:
MarkLogic® Server is the only enterprise NoSQL database designed for building reliable, scalable and secure search, analytics and information applications quickly and easily. The platform includes tools for fast application development, powerful analytics and visualization widgets for greater insight, and the ability to create user-defined functions for fast and flexible analysis of huge volumes of data.
I am uncomfortable with the notion of “only”. MarkLogic is an XML centric data management system. Software wrappers can use the XML back end for a range of applications. These include something as exotic as a Web site for the US Army to more sophisticated applications for publishing technical documents for an aircraft manufacturing firm. However, there are a number of ways to accomplish these tasks and some of the options make use of somewhat similar technology; for example, eXist-db. While not perfect, the fact that an alternative exists only increases my discomfort with an “only”.
So what’s up? My hunch is that both MarkLogic and Temis are in flat out marketing mode. Clusters of announcements are, in my experience, an indication that the pipeline needs to be filled. Equally surprising is that MarkLogic into a big data player and an enterprise search system, not a publishing system. Most vendors are morphing. The tie up with Temis suggests that Temis’ back end needs some beefing up. The MarkLogic positioning is that it is now a player in semantics and big data. I think that partnering is a quick way to fill gaps.
Will MarkLogic blast through the $100 million in revenue ceiling? Will Temis emerge as a giant slayer in semantic big data? The company recently raised $25 million to become a player in big data. (See “Big Data Boon: MarkLogic Pulls In $25 Million In VC Funding”.) Converting $25 million into high margin revenue could tax the likes of Jack Welch in his prime.
My hunch is that both firms’ management teams have this as a 2013 goal. With the patience of investors wearing thin for many search and content processing vendors, closed deals are a must. The economy may be improving for analysts on CNBC, but for search vendors, making Autonomy-scale or Endeca-scale revenues may be difficult, if not impossible.
In my opinion, the labels “big data” and semantics do not by themselves deliver revenue the way Google delivers Adwords. As more search firms chase additional funding, has the world of search switched from finding information for customers to getting money to stay in business?
No timidity visible as these two firms race down the semantic interstate.
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2013
Google Dominance May Be Waning
April 11, 2013
Google is the reigning king of search, but some say that may be changing. After all-time highs in March, Google stock has slipped in early April. Chris Crum, in his article, “Will Google Ever Stop Dominating Search?” addresses some of the reasons for the subtle decline.
He says:
“Forbes, for example, has a piece out today called ‘Four Reasons Google’s Stock Is Slowing Down.’ The first two reasons listed in this article are directly related to this issue: 1. Losing search market share and 2. Shift to mobile search. The author references a New York Times article making the rounds today, in which the case is made that people, particularly on mobile, are choosing other services first, based on the type of information they’re looking for.”
Some predict that a combination of smaller specialized services will eventually take Google’s place, particularly on mobile. And while Google is not going anywhere anytime soon, it is a sign that the landscape of search is changing. One of the areas where a specialized service makes sense is enterprise search. A solution like LucidWorks is much better suited to the subtleties of the enterprise than a generic mega-solution like Google Analytics or SharePoint.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Sword Group and TEMIS Partner
April 2, 2013
TEMIS has already built its reputation as one of the leading providers of Semantic Content Enrichment for Enterprise as well as the SWORD Group and they recently announced a partnership. The Tag Line article “Sword Group Partners with TEMIS to Democratize the Semantic Enrichment in the Business” which was translated using Google talks about the new budding relationship. SWORD Group is now considered a certified “Gold Partner” and now uses the TEXIS Luxid platform.
“Luxid Content Enrichment Platform is a platform for robust semantic enrichment of content, which extracts the relevant business information contained in unstructured documents, and rich metadata. Revealing facets of business information assets, it helps to optimize the management and archiving, dissemination within portals, as well as analysis.”
SWORD Group is a consulting group and they focus on assisting their clients with managing information, analysis and classification. Their technology helps to extract, transform, enrich and also publish information and their Gold Partner collaboration with TEMIS they will be able to obtain a deep knowledge of Luxid and more importantly its uses. Philippe Le Calve, Chief Executive Officer SWORD France made the following statement.
“The signing of this partnership between Gold and TEMIS SWORD follows several years of working on our projects. Good value and robust in natural language processing, TEMIS is a natural ally essential to its strategy SWORD valuation information. Luxid ® platform is a key technology pillars that support the semantic solutions designed by SWORD.”
Luxid aims to be easily integrated into a variety of content management systems and can be connected to a number of different solutions including Microsoft SharePoint Solutions, EMC Documentum and MarkLogic. TEMIS definitely has worked its charm on SWORD looks like they got a good thing going.
April Holmes, April 02, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
JackBe Releases Presto 3.5 BI Solution
March 4, 2013
The Best Analytics Blog presents us with quite the string of buzzwords in, “JackBe Brings Metric-Driven Real-Time Operational Intelligence to Front-Line. . . .” The press release tells us that the business intelligence outfit JackBe has released the newest version of its flagship product, Presto. This version is said to improve the accessibility of the software’s operational measures. The write-up states:
“Presto 3.5 extends its user-friendly interface to include new options to create dashboards through drag-and-drop, to add custom visualizations as easily as plugging in the view, and to customize Presto with a customer’s own logo and colors. Once created, all Presto dashboards are portable with HTML5 apps that run anywhere, including SharePoint, portals, websites, tablets and mobile phones with the same look-and-feel of the native device. Presto 3.5 has enhanced security for mobile devices and a more secure single-sign-on experience for social media sites.”
JackBe emphasizes real-time intelligence tools and easy-to-use dashboards while promising tight security features. They also offer their own add-ons for use with mobile devices, portals, and SharePoint. The company is headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with offices in Mexico City and Fremont, California.
Cynthia Murrell, March 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IBM Launching New Collaborative Communications Products Including Upgrade to Connections
February 26, 2013
The IBM announcement that it will be rolling out new communication products and new upgrades for its existing social networking product, Connections hasn’t really come as a big shock to many. IBM has spent time and money acquiring new technologies and working to integrate those technologies.
CIO’s “IBM To Beef Up Content Management, Analytics In Connections Enterprise Social Product,” takes consumers through some of the basic changes they can expect to see when the products are unveiled on Monday at Connect 2013.
“At a press conference after the session, Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of IBM’s Software Solutions Group, said that the impact of enterprise social technologies in collaboration and front-office business processes like HR and marketing amounts to a “generational shift” that is transforming how companies function, and will do so for the next two decades.”
We aren’t really told which acquisitions are responsible for which upgrades and integrations but if IBM’s dreams come true, the new content management function of Connections will rival that of Microsoft’s SharePoint, a big assertion for sure.
The IBM Employee Experience Suite is one of the few newly designed products that fully explains where the new upgrades came from, in this instance, the human resource management apps are courtesy of the $1.3 billion acquisition of Kenexa.
While still a little cloudy on the content, it will be interesting to keep an eye on IBM over the next year and not just at its product reveal early next week. It’s a sink or swim time in business technology with so many up and coming developers and technologies just waiting in the wings for an opportunity. We’ll see how IBM continues to stack up.
Leslie Radcliff, February 26, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
DataFacet Video
February 15, 2013
DataFacet’s stream of news slowed in late 2012. The outfit seems to be quiet; what’s going on over there? While we wait for their next move, check out the interesting video on the DataFacet Web site, which effectively introduces their product. It begins with a good explanation of “taxonomy,” which might be useful to bookmark in case you need to define the term for someone unfamiliar with the field. The video goes on to show someone using parts of the DataFacet system, which gives a much better idea of what it does than any text explanation could. It’s set to a catchy tune, too.
The product description surrounding the video specifies:
DataFacet provides a taxonomy based data model for your enterprise’s unstructured information along with a sophisticated, yet easy to use, set of tools for applying the data model to your content.
It’s an easy three step process:
- Choose your foundation taxonomies from the DataFacet library of over 500 topic domains
- Customize your taxonomy with DataFacet Taxonomy Manager
- Tag your content with DataFacet Taxonomy Server
DataFacet is already available for the following search and content environments:
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010
- Oracle WebCenter Content
- Apache Solr and Lucene
- MarkLogic Server
- Exalead CloudView
- Coveo Enterprise Search
- Autonomy IDOL
- Less than 1 week turnaround for most custom platform integrations.
DataFacet is actually a joint project, built by taxonomists from WAND and Applied Relevance. Based in Denver, Colorado, WAND has been developing structured multi-lingual vocabularies since 1998. Their taxonomies have been put to good use in online search systems, ad-matching engines, B2B directories, product searches, and within enterprise search engines.
Applied Relevance offers automated tagging to help organizations contextualize their unstructured data. They have designed their user interface using cross-platform JavaScript and HTML5, which gives their application the flexibility to run in a browser, be embedded in a Web page, or be hosted in an Adobe Air desktop application.
Cynthia Murrell, February 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Salesforce Acquires Entropy Soft
February 7, 2013
Connectors are important. If a system cannot acquire content from a system, the fanciest text processing system cannot do its work. Years ago Oracle acquired Stellent which had snapped up Outside In. Now Salesforce has followed in Oracle’s footsteps with its acquisition of Entropy Soft. (I assume the story “Salesforce.com Has Acquired French Startup EntropySoft.”) Entropy Soft is not a start up in my opinion. The company was set up in 2005 or so. According to the write up, Entropy Soft had about $3.5 million in funding. Details are limited. The question which the deal raises is, “What services will Salesforce introduce which acquires software to acquire diverse enterprise content?”
A list of Entropy Soft connectors is no longer available online. According to my files, Entropy Soft has more than 40 connectors. These include:
- Microsoft SharePoint
- IBM Lotus Quickplace
- Hummingbird DM
- Alfresco
- FileNet
- Interwoven
- EMC Documentum
Update: A list of Oracle connectors is at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/search/oses/ses-connectors-178226.pdf
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2013
Now You Are Talking: Can a Company Make Money with Enterprise Search?
January 22, 2013
I have better things to do that capture my immediate thoughts about “Inside H-P’s Missed Chance to Avoid a Disastrous Deal.” You can find the article in a dead tree version of the Wall Street Journal on page 1 with a jump to Page 16, where the “would not comment” phrase appears with alarming frequency.
The most interesting point in the write up is the quote, allegedly crafted by a Hewlett Packard Big Dog:
Now you’re talking.
Like much of the chatter about search, content processing, and Big Data analytics, on the surface these information retrieval software companies are like Kentucky Derby hopefuls on a crisp spring morning. The big pay day is two minutes away. How can the sleek, groomed, documented thoroughbreds lose?
The reality, documented in the Wall Street Journal, is that some companies with sure fire winning strategies can win. Now you’re talking.
How did HP get itself into the headline making situation? How can smart folks spend so much money, reverse course, and appear to be so scattered? Beats me.
I have, however, seen this before. As I read the Wall Street Journal’s story, I wrote down some thoughts in the margin of the dead tree instance of the story at the breakfast table.
A happy quack to Lubrisyn.com
Herewith are my notes to myself:
First, name one search vendor in the period from 1970 to the present which has generated more than $1 billion in revenue from search. Acquisitions like IBM’s purchase of iPhrase (er, what happened to that outfit), Vivisimo (now a Big Data company!), or SPSS’s Clementine (ah, you don’t know Clementine. Shame on you.) Don’t toss Google and its search appliance into the mix. Google only hints at the great success of the product. When was the last time you searched using a Google Search Appliance?
Second, didn’t Microsoft purchase Fast Search & Transfer for $1.2 billion in January 2008. How is that working out? The legions of search add in vendors for SharePoint are busy, but the core system has become a little bit like dear old Clementine. Fast Search was the subject of a couple of probes, but the big question which has not yet been answered as far as I know is, “How much revenue did Fast Search generate versus how much revenue Fast Search reported?” I heard that the revenues were, to some degree, inflated. I thought search was a sure fire way to make money.
Third, after more than a decade of top down marketing, why did Endeca need cash infusions from Intel and SAP venture units? How much did Oracle pay for Endeca? Some azure chip consultants have described Endeca as the leading vendor of enterprise search. Endeca added ecommerce and business intelligence to its line up of products. What was the firm’s revenue at the time of its sale to Oracle? I estimated about $150 million.
Fourth, Dassault, the company with the “system”, bought Exalead. What has happened to this promising technology? Is Exalead now a $200 million a year revenue producer for the prestigious French engineering firm? Perhaps the “system” has been so successful that Exalead is now infused into Dassault clients throughout the world? On the other hand, wouldn’t a solution with this type of impact make headlines every week even in the US. Is it more difficult to to cultivate information retrieval revenues than other types of software revenue? The good news is that Dassault paid a reasonable price for Exalead, avoiding the Autonomy, Endeca, and Fast Search purchase prices.
These examples reminded me that even if my estimates are wide of the mark by 20 or 30 percent, how could any company generate the astounding growth required to pay the $11 billion acquisition cost, invest in search technology, and market a product which is pretty much available for free as open source software today? Answer: Long shot. Exercise that horse and make sure you have what it takes to pay the jockey, the stable hands, the vet, and the transportation costs. Without that cash cushion, a Derby hopeful will put a person in a financial hole. Similar to search dreams of big acquirers? Yep. Maybe identical?
Two different points occurred to me.
On one hand, search and its bandwagon riders like Big Data analytics must seems to be a combination of the Klondike’s mother load and a must-have function no matter what a professional does for a living. The reality is that of the 65 search and related vendors I have written about in my books and confidential reports, only three managed to break the $100 million in search revenue ceiling. The companies were Autonomy, Endeca, and Fast Search. Of the three, only Endeca emerged relatively unscathed from the process. The other 62 companies either went out of business (Convera, Delphes, Entopia) or stalled at revenues in the millions of dollar. If one totals the investments in these 65 firms to generate their revenues, search is not a break even investment. Companies like Attivio and Coveo have captured tens of millions of venture dollars. Those investors want a return. What are the odds that these companies can generate more revenues than Autonomy? Interesting question.
On the other hand, search and its child disciplines remain the most complex of modern computing problems. Whether it is voice to text to search and then to predictive analytics for voice call intercepts or just figuring out what Buffy and Trent in the sales department need to understand a new competitor, software is just not up to the task. That means that money pumped into promising companies will pay big dividends. Now the logic may make sense to an MBA, but I have spent more than 35 years explaining that progress in search is tough to achieve, expensive to support, and disappointing to most system users. The notion that a big company could buy software that is essentially customized to each customer’s use cases (notice the plural of “cases”) and make big money is a characteristic of many firms and managers. The reality is that even governments lack the money to make search work.
Don’t get me wrong.
There are small firms which because they focus on quite specific problems can deliver value to a licensee. However, big money assumes that search technology will be a universal, easily applied to many situations. Even Google, with its paid search model, is now facing innovation challenges. With lots of smart people, Google is hiring the aging wizards of search in an attempt to find something that works better than the voting methods in use today.
What do my jottings suggest? Search is a tough business. Assumptions about how much money one can make from search in an era of open source options and cost cutting need to be looked at in a different way. The current approach, as the Wall Street Journal write up makes clear, is not working particularly well. Does this search revenue track record suggest that the azure chip consultants, former middle school teachers, and real journalists miss the larger message of search, content processing, and Big Data analytics? My tentative answer is, “Yep.”
Stephen E Arnold, January 22, 2013
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