Smartlogic Buys SchemaLogic: Consoliation Underway
September 15, 2011
Mergers have captured the attention of the media and for good reason. Deals which fuse two companies create new opportunities and can disrupt certain market sectors. For example, Hewlett Packard’s purchase of Autonomy has bulldozed the search landscape. Now Smartlogic has acquired SchemaLogic and is poised to have the same effect on the world of taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and the hot business sector described as “tagging” or “metadata.”
As you know, Smartlogic has emerged as one of the leaders in content tagging, metadata, indexing, ontologies, and associated services. The company’s tag line is that its systems and methods deliver content intelligence solutions. Smartlogic supports the Google search technology, open source search solutions such as Solr, and Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Fast Search. Smartlogic’s customers include UBS, Yell.com, Autodesk, the McClatchy Company, and many others.
With the acquisition of SchemaLogic, Smartlogic tries to become one of the leading if not the leading company in the white hot semantic content processing market. The addition of SchemaServer to the platform adds incremental functionality and extends solutions for customers. The merger adds more clients to Smartlogic’s current list of Fortune 1000 and global enterprise customers and confirms the company as the leading provider of Content Intelligent Software. Jeremy Bentley told Beyond Search:
Smartlogic has a reputation for providing innovative Content Intelligence solutions alongside an impeccable delivery record. We look forward to providing Grade A support to our new clients, and to broadening the appeal of Semaphore.
SchemaLogic was founded in 2003 by Breanna Anderson (CTO) and Andrei Ovchinnikov (a Russian martial arts expert with a love of taxonomy and advisory board member) and Trevor Traina (chairman and entrepreneur; he sold Compare.Net comparison shopping company to Microsoft in 1999). SchemaLogic launched its first product in November 2003. The company’s flagship product is SchemaServer. The executive lineup has changed since the company’s founding, but the focus on indexing and management of controlled term lists has remained.
A company can use the SchemaLogic products to undertake master metadata management for content destined for a search and retrieval system or a text analytics / business intelligence system. However, unlike fully automated tagging systems, SchemaLogic products can make use of available controlled term lists, knowledge bases, and dictionaries. The system includes an administrative interface and index management tools which permit the licensee to edit or link certain concepts. The idea is that SchemaServer (and MetaPoint which is the SharePoint variant) provides a centralized repository which other enterprise applications can use as a source of key words and phrases. When properly resourced and configured, the SchemaLogic approach eliminates the Balkanization and inconsistency of indexing which is a characteristic of many organization’s content processing systems.
Early in the company’s history, SchemaLogic focused on SharePoint. The firm added support for Linux and Unix. Today, when I think of SchemaLogic, I associate the company with Microsoft SharePoint. The MetaPoint system works when one wants to improve the quality of Sharepoint metadata. But the system can be used for eDiscovery and applications where compliance guidelines require consistent application of terminology? Time will tell, particularly as the market for taxonomy systems continues to soften.
Three observations are warranted:
First, not since Business Objects’ acquisition of Inxight has a content processing deal had the potential to disrupt an essential and increasingly important market sector.
Second, with the combined client list and the complementary approach to semantic technology, Smartlogic is poised to move forward rapidly with value added content processing services. Work flow is one area where I expect to see significant market interest.
Third, smaller firms will now find that size does matter, particularly when offering products and services to Fortune 1000 firms.
Our view is that there will be further content centric mergers and investments in the run up to 2012. Attrition is becoming a feature of the search and content processing sector.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
SAP and Risk Automation
May 27, 2011
SAP information continues to flow to me. An attention grabber was the story “Who’s the Top Innovator: SAP or Oracle?” I scanned the article and wondered why the author ignored Apple? With the set of innovators limited to a relational database company and an IBM-influenced traditional enterprise software company, I concluded, “PR. Skip.”
However, the news release “Proviti Teams Up with SAP Labs U.S. to Enhance Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Analytics for CIOs and IT Executives” contained information that surprised me.
Proviti will be designing some automated controls to be employed in conjunction with SAP’s newest analytic application, BusinessObjects Executive IT Reporting.
The desired outcome is to give those at the top a well-rounded picture of the risks plaguing their businesses through a whole slew of buzz-word themed tools such as IT dashboards and key risk indicators. I like “well rounded” as a way to explain business fixes.
We found the following passage by the senior director of SAP’s IT strategy group to be particularly interesting:
Today, in many companies, IT controls and risk-management activities are at best manual, subjective activities. By automating these activities and linking them to business processes, we can allow customers to simplify their compliance and risk management activities, protect value by anticipating common losses, and create more value by taking on more calculated technology risk.
Do we sense an admission that when humans use software they create a content disaster? What took so long for that revelation?
The challenges of implementing enterprise solutions using IBM-style and SAP-like solutions are significant. The buzzword “governance” means that costs are tough to control and users often must adapt to systems, not the other way around. Governance is a signal to me that information chaos exists. So governance and other content-free words are used to cope with intractable issues. Are traditional enterprise software solutions to be to be subject to “governance”? Just an engineer’s skepticism at work.
What happened to TREX and Inxight? Search is apparently not an issue.
Sarah Rogers, May 27, 2011
Freebie
Pricing 2011
December 2, 2010
When you read this article, the deal train may have left the station. Beyond Search is not a news publication, much to the chagrin of the Buffies and Trents who work in the “real news” game. The information in “Big Sale: Get Intellexer Summarizer and Categorizer with 50% Discount” is of interest to us in Harrod’s Creek because it hints at pricing 2011. According to the write up:
Save up to 50% with special sale offer from EffectiveSoft by ordering Summarizer or Categorizer tools in this year…. Intellexer Summarizer and Categorizer are semantic solutions intended for knowledge retrieval and data management. Categorizer will automatically organize a large amount of text files, and Summarizer will spare you reading the entire document and save your time for leisure. EffectiveSoft’s products are based on semantic platform Intellexer SDK (a unique product released by R&D department for knowledge management). In addition to proprietary products development EffectiveSoft company enhances existing customer application with the power of semantic technologies.
EffectiveSoft is located in Minsk, Belarus and was founded in 2000. The company is a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner. More information is available at http://www.effectivesoft.com/.
Translation, summarization, leveling up, and bird’s-eye views are spilling into and across market segments. Customer support, business intelligence, and eDiscovery vendors want to process multiple languages and perform a range of content “value adds”. You can learn more about this particular offer at:
http://summarizer.intellexer.com
http://categorizer.intellexer.com
The question we asked ourselves was, “Will a lower price expand the market for these types of content processing systems?”
We know that some of the vendors following the path blazed by i2 Ltd 20 years ago are charging hefty fees for their systems. Other useful products like Inxight’s ThingFinder have dropped completely off our radar. In short, there is feverish activity in advanced content processing.
Maybe even more drastic price cuts are a way to fame and fortune? The problem is that a clever lad or lass can push some interesting software via open source or a giant troll of a company can just give advanced text processing away to get the maintenance and engineering services business.
Worth watching this pricing trend.
Stephen E Arnold, December 2, 2010
Freebie
TEMIS and Its Luxid Toolbar
September 26, 2010
A reader in Europe alerted us to the new Luxid Toolbar. TEMIS, which assets that it is the leading provider of text analytics solutions for the enterprise, offers a free LuxidBar. You can get the software from www.temis.com. According to Tagline, the TEMIS Web log:
The publicly available LuxidBar connects to a Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform hosted and maintained by TEMIS in the cloud. The platform performs a broad range of business and scientific entities extractions together with their semantic relationships.
The company say that the software “inserts smart links on the fly within the text” and “displays information analytics dynamically.”
The add in reminds us of some of the functionality available to users of the Inxight system before the company was acquired by Business Objects, which in turn was acquired by SAP.
TEMIS says, “This unique Internet browser sidebar accelerates Web page and document reading and connects users to related knowledge.” There is a stampede for this type of value adding in content processing. Other firms in the race include i2 Ltd. (which is not chasing the consumer market after 20 years of labor in this particular vineyard), Palantir (a company involved in what seems to be a tar pit related to its content refining methods technologies), JackBe (a former government centric outfit now probing the enterprise mashup market), and dozens of other companies moving from the intelligence market to the commercial market as funds in war fighting get redirected.
Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2010
Freebie
SAS Teragram in Marketing Push
March 25, 2010
Two readers on two different continents sent me links to write ups about SAS Teragram. As you may know, SAS has been a licensee of the Inxight technology for various text processing operations. Business Objects bought Inxight, and then SAP bought Business Objects. I was told a year or so ago that there was no material change in the way in which SAS worked with Inxight. Not long after I heard that remark, SAS bought the little-known specialist content processing firm, Teragram. Teragram, founded by Yves Schabes and a fellow academic, landed some big clients for the firm’s automated text processing system. These clients included the New York Times and, I believe, America Online.
Teragram has integrated its software with Apache Lucene, and the company has rolled out what it calls a Sentiment Analysis Manager. The idea behind sentiment analysis is simple. Process text such as customer emails and flag the ones that are potential problems. These “problems” can then be given special attention.
The first news item I received from a reader was a pointer to a summary of an interview with Dr. Schabes on the Business Intelligence network. Like ZDNet and Fierce Media, these are pay-for-coverage services. The podcasts usually reach several hundred people and the information is recycled in print and as audio files. The article was “Teragram Delivers Text Analytics Solutions and Language Technologies.” You can find a summary in the write up, but the link to the audio file was not working when I checked it out (March 24, 2010, at 8 am Eastern). The most interesting comment in the write up in my opinion was:
Business intelligence has evolved from a field of computing on numbers to actually computing on text, and that is where natural language processing and linguistics comes in… Text is a reflection of language, and you need computational linguistics technologies to be able to turn language into a structure of information. That is really what the core mission of our company is to provide technologies that allow us to treat text at a more elaborate level than just characters, and to add structure on top of documents and language.
The second item appeared as “SAS Text Analytics, The Last Frontier in the Analysis of Documents” in Areapress. The passage in that write up I noted was this list of licensees:
Associated Press, eBay, Factiva, Forbes.com, Hewlett Packard, New York Times Company, Reed Business Information, Sony, Tribune Interactive, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, Yahoo! and the World Bank.
I am not sure how up to date the list is. I heard that the World Bank recently switched search systems. For more information about Teragram, navigate to the SAS Web site. Could this uptick in SAS Teragram marketing be another indication that making sales is getting more difficult in today’s financial climate?
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2010
A no fee write up. I will report this sad state of affairs to the IMF, which it appears is not clued in like the World Bank.
An Attensity About Face?
February 3, 2010
Update, February 3, 2010, 9 pm Eastern. A person suggested that this administrative move is designed to get around one or more procurement guidelines. Sounds reasonable but if the marketing push were ringing the cash register, would such a shift be necessary?–Stephen E Arnold
I learned that the Attensity Group has set up a business unit to sell to the Federal government. I thought Attensity’s roots were in selling to the Federal government and that the company’s diversification into marketing was a way to break free of the stereotypical vendor dependent on US government projects. Guess I was wrong again.
A reader sent me a link to this January 28, 2010, news release “Attensity Government Systems Launches as a Wholly Owned US Subsidiary of Attensity Group.” I noted this passage in the news release:
AGS offers a unique combination of the world’s leading semantic technologies: Attensity Group’s full offering of semantic engines and applications along with Inxight technologies from SAP BusinessObjects. Government agencies can now leverage — for the first time – the powerful capabilities enabled by the combination of Inxight’s multi-lingual advanced entity and event extraction with that of Attensity Group’s patented Exhaustive Extraction. Exhaustive Extraction automatically identifies and transforms the facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble spots in unstructured text into structured, actionable intelligence and then connects it back to entities – people, places and things. This new combined solution provides researchers with the deepest and broadest capabilities for identifying issues hidden in mountains of unstructured data — inside emails, letters, social media sites, passenger manifests, websites, and more.
In my experience, this is a hybrid play. Along with consulting and engineering services, Attensity will make its proprietary solutions available.
According Attensity, AGS, short for Attensity Government Systems, will:
provides semantic technologies and software applications that enable government agencies to quickly find, understand, and use information trapped in unstructured text to drive critical decision-making. AGS solutions pre-integrate nouns (entities) together with verbs, combining leading semantic technologies, such as Inxight ThingFinder, with Attensity’s unique exhaustive extraction and other semantic language capabilities. This creates a unique capability to see important relationships, create link analysis charts, easily integrate with other software packages, and connect the dots in near real-time when time is of the essence. The comprehensive suite of commercial off-the-shelf applications includes intelligence analysis, social media monitoring, voice of the citizen, automated communications response and routing, and the industry’s most extensive suite of semantic extraction technologies. With installations in intelligence, defense and civilian agencies, Attensity enables organizations to better track trends, identify patterns, detect anomalies, reduce threats, and seize opportunities faster.
I did a quick check of my files on Inxight. A similar functionality may be part of the Powerset technology that acquired acquired. My hunch is that Attensity wants to go after government contracts with a broader offering than its own deep extraction technology. The play makes sense, but I wonder if it will confuse the ad execs who use Attensity technology for quite different purposes than some US government agencies.
Will Attensity be a front runner in this about face, or will the company build out other specialized business units? I can see a customer support unit coming from a vendor, maybe Attensity, maybe not? The bottom line is that search and content processing vendors are scrambling in order to avoid what some business school egg heads call “commoditization.”
Stephen E Arnold, February 3, 2010
No one paid me to write about vendors selling to the US government. I will report this to the US government, maybe the GAO just to show that I am intrinsically responsible.
Oracle SES11 in Beta
October 3, 2009
Oracle has put some wood behind its Secure Enterprise Search product. The current version is SES10.1.8 G. You can download this system at this Oracle link. I learned from one of my two or three readers that Oracle has moved SES11 into beta mode. The product manager of the beta is Stefan Buchta. If you want to test the system, you can obtain his email address and more information at this Oracle link.
As I was getting up to speed, I noticed that Oracle had available a new white paper, dated January 2009. The addled goose was ashamed of himself. He missed this document in his routine scan of the Oracle Overflight reports.
After downloading the white paper “Secure Enterprise Search Version 10.1.8.4”, the addled goose noticed some interesting items; to wit:
The white paper reports “sub second query performance”. My question was, “What’s the index size, refresh and query load, and system infrastructure? Throwing hardware at a performance problem is often a way to resolve performance issues, and my hunch is that SES10g can be a computational glutton.
Second, among the enhancements listed was “security”. Hmm. Security has been a feature since version 9i as I recall. I wonder how security has been improved because the “full security” for search requires the licensing of the Oracle security server which may no longer be required, but somehow I doubt that Oracle has bundled this component with the plain vanilla SES10g product.
Third, SES10g seems to use the word “repository” in concert with the phrase “Oracle 10g database”. My recollection is that the “database” can be prone to certain Oracle bottlenecks related to intensive disc reads. Performance, therefore, is easy to talk about but may be expensive to deliver. But since we have not tested this most recent build, maybe the bottlenecks have been resolved. I have heard that Oracle is a Google partner and that some of the applications folks at Oracle are using the Google Search Appliance, not SES10g. Maybe this is an aberration?
Fourth, the crawler can handled structured and unstructured data. I know that SES10g can deal with structured data. That is a core competency of Oracle. I am not 100 percent that the unstructured data challenge has been fully met. Customers want hybrid content systems and the market is heating up. Autonomy’s SPE is a challenger because the Oracle solution may not be the home run that the white paper suggests. Autonomy is quite savvy when it comes to exploiting opportunities created by large players who don’t deliver fully on the market collaterals’ assertions.
Fifth, connectors get more attention. The list of connectors on page 25 of the white paper seems to lag what’s offered by the Lucid Imagination open source search system and is even farther behind connectors available from Coveo, Exalead, and others in the search and content processing sector. Surprisingly, connectors for MicroStrategy (close to Clarabridge), Business Objects (SAP and Inxight), and Cognos (IBM) have been removed. Well, that’s one way to get Oracle shops to adopt Oracle’s in house and acquired business intelligence components.
The white paper concludes with a snapshot of the AT Kearney knowledge portal. EDS bought AT Kearney and then the partners of AT Kearney bought the firm from EDS in 2005. Since that time, AT Kearney has been chugging along. It ranks among the blue chip consulting firms and is still working to meet the lofty goals set forth by Andrew Thomas Kearney in 1929. I wonder if Oracle is an AT Kearney client. I will have to check.
The knowledge portal interface reminded me of the Clearwell Systems, Coveo, and Exalead interfaces by the way.
In short, the white paper struck me as a modest update to the previous Oracle white papers. I did not see a reference to the vertical vocabularies that were once available for Oracle content processing systems. The architecture did not strike me as significantly different. Performance gains probably come from using Intel’s multi core processors and the larger memory space enabled with 64 bit support.
Take a look. I have no pricing data at this time.
Stephen Arnold, October 3, 2009
Training Wheels for Business Intelligence?
September 17, 2009
Business intelligence is not like riding a bicycle. In fact, business intelligence requires quite a bit of statistical and mathematical sophistication. Some pundits and marketers believe that visualization will make the outputs of business intelligence systems “actionable”. I don’t agree. There’s another faction in business intelligence who see search as the solution to the brutal costs and complexities of business intelligence. I am on the fence about this “solution” for three reasons. First, if the underlying data are lousy, the outputs are lousy and the user is often none the wiser. Second, the notion of “search” is an interface spin. The user types a query and the system transforms the query into something the system can understand. What if the transformation goes off the tracks? The user is often none the wiser. Third, the notion of visualization combined with search is a typical marketing play: take two undefined notions which sound really good and glue them together. The result is an even more slippery term which, of course, no one defines with mathematical or financial precision.
Now read Channel Web’s “Visualization, Search, Among Emerging Trends in BI”, and you will see how the trade press creates a sense of purpose, movement, and innovation without providing any substance. The source of the article is none other than azure chip consultancy, the Gartner Group. I wrote about the firm’s assertion that no one can “copy” its information. I know at least one reason: I find quite a few of the firm’s assertions off the tracks upon this goose’s railroad runs.
Here’s the key passage in the Channel Web write up for me:
Schlegel identified seven emerging trends that will be key drivers for BI implementations, perhaps even down to the consumer level, in the future. The trends are: interactive visualization, in-memory analytics, BI integrated search, Software-as-a-Service, SOA/mash-ups, predictive modeling and social networking software. "A lot of technologies we’ll talk about to help build BI systems don’t even exist today, but some are right around the corner," he said. "Business intelligence can break out of the corporate world. Usually it’s consumer technology moving into the corporate world. I think it could be the other way around."
“Intelligence”, in my opinion, is an art or practice supported by human and machine-centric systems. Business intelligence remains a niche business because the vendors who market business intelligence systems rely on structured data, statistical routines taught in second and third year stats classes, and anchored in the programming tools from SAS and SPSS (now a unit of IBM). By the way, IBM now owns Cognos and SPSS, which seems to be a market share play, not a technology play in my opinion.)
The end of enterprise libraries caused a vacuum in some organization’s information access. The “regular” business intelligence unit focused on structured data and generating reports that look pretty much like the green bar reports I obtained from stats routines in the mid 1960s. To say that business intelligence methods are anchored in tradition is a bit of an understatement.
The surge in end user access to information on the Internet has thrown a curve to the business intelligence establishment. In response, SAS, for example, licensed the Inxight tools to process information and then purchased Teragram to obtain more of the “unstructured text goodness” that was lacking in traditional SAS installations. New vendors such as Attivio and Clarabridge have exploited this gap in the traditional Business Objects (now part of SAP and owner of Inxight), Cognos, SAS, and SPSS product offerings. I am not sure how successful these “crossover” companies will be. Clarabridge seems to have an edge because its technology plays well with MicroStrategy’s Version 9 system. Attivio is in more of a “go it alone” mode.
With Google’s Fusion Tables and WolframAlpha’s “search” service, there is increasing pressure on business intelligence vendors to:
- Cut prices
- Improve return on investment
- Handle transformation and meta metatagging of unstructured information
- Deliver better for fee outputs that the math folks from Google and Wolfram do for free.
My hunch is that the Gartner position reflects the traditional world of business intelligence and is designed to sell consulting services, maybe a conference or two.
Much can be done to enhance the usability of business intelligence. I think that in certain situations, visualization tools can clarify certain types of data. The notion of a search interface is a more complicated challenge. My research suggests that Google’s research into converting a query into a useful query that works across fact based information is light years ahead of what’s referenced in the trade publications and most consultants’ descriptions of next generation business intelligence.
When structured and unstructured content are processed in a meaningful way, new types of queries become possible. The outputs of these new types of queries deliver useful business intelligence. My view is that much of business intelligence is going to be disrupted when Google makes available some of its innovations.
In the meantime, the comfortable world of business intelligence will cruise along with incremental improvements until the Google disruption, if it takes place, reworks the landscape. Odds are 70 – 30 for Google to surprise the business intelligence world in the next six to nine months. Fusion Tables are baby steps.
Stephen Arnold, September 17, 2009
Who Is Who in the Chase for US Govt Information Work
August 26, 2009
I was poking around for information on the Teradata technology and I read “An Important Benchmark for Federal Knowledge Management”. The most important items in the write up were this check list of vendors chasing Federal projects. Here’s the list, “Cognos [now IBM], Business Objects [now SAP], MicroStrategy Autonomy, Blackboard, Vivisimo [a search vendor], Hummingbird [a unit of Open Text], Informatica, Tomoye [social software], Concept Searching, Elsevier [sci tech publisher], SER [Brainware?], Interwoven [now Autonomy], Fig Leaf Software [training company], Mark Logic, TIBCO [plumbing and infrastructure], Vignette [now Open Text], Convera, Factiva [now Dow Jones], Inxight [same as Business Objects now], Ascential, First Logic, Stratify, MetaCarta [mapping with In-Q-Tel backing], Trillium, Hyperion, Teradata, [and] Attensity.” Several of the names surprised me. For example, Covera. Another was Concept Searching, a company not in my files. Quite a list for a knowledge centric conference. Seems redundant and out of date yet the article published on BeyeNetwork has an August 18, 2009, date stamp. Explicit, accurate company identification is useful to me. Dr. Ramon Barquin and BeyeNetwork may have an alternative view.
Stephen Arnold, August 26, 2009
SAP Data Warehouse Search
May 14, 2009
Application Development Trends reported here that SAP has rolled out a new datawarehouse search tool. the product is called Business Objects Explorer, and it seems to allow simplified queries so that end users can get reports without having to involve a Business Objects programming wizard. The story “SAP Launches Data Warehouse Search Tool” said:
Explorer evolved from a Business Objects-developed tool called Polestar, released in late 2007, which lets individuals conduct searches against data in the SAP Business Objects XI 3.1 BI platform. Using a Web-based interface, SAP officials said Explorer will now let any user, regardless of their knowledge of BI, query SAP’s NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA), the company’s tooling for creating data warehouses.
Nary a word about Inxight, the content processing company Business Objects acquired, nor about any other SAP search initiatives. Poor TREX. Is he orphaned? Endeca and its business intelligence capability? Silence. Will Flash plug ins deliver what Business Objects’ users want? User experience seems to be the way to deliver industrial strength search.
Stephen Arnold, May 14, 2009
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