SharePoint Revealed
September 23, 2015
Microsoft SharePoint. It brings smiles to the faces of the consultants and Certified Experts who can make the collection of disparate parts work like refurbished John Harrison clock.
I read “Microsoft SharePoint ECM Suite for Content Management.” The write up explains that SharePoint became available in 2001. The write up does not reference the NCompass Labs’ acqusition or other bits and pieces of the SharePoint story. That’s okay. It is 2015. Ancient history in terms of Internet time. Also, what is content management? Does it include audio, video, and digital images? What about binaries? What about data happily stored on the state of Michigan’s mainframes?
Jack Benny’s Maxwell reminds me of Fast Search’s 1998 approach to information access. With Fast Search inside, SharePoint delivers performance that is up to the Maxwell’s standards for speed, reliability, and engineering excellence.
The write up reveals that SharePoint evolved “gradually.” The most recent incarnation of the system includes a number of functions; specifically mentioned in the article, are:
- A cloud based service
- A foundation for collaboration and document sharing
- A server. I thought there were multiple servers. Guess not.
- A designer component for creating nifty looking user experiences. Isn’t Visual Studio or other programming tool required as well?
- Cloud storage. Isn’t this redundant?
- Search
I prefer a more modern approach to information access. The search systems I use are like a Kia Soul. The code often includes hamsters too.
Here’s what the write up says about search:
Microsoft FAST Search, which provides indexing and efficient search of content of all types.
I like the indexing and “efficient” description. The content of “all types” is interesting as well.
How well does Fast Search in its present incarnation handle audio and video? What about real time streams of social media like the Twitter fire hose? You get the idea. “All” is shorthand for “some” content.
I am not captivated by the whizzy features in SharePoint and its content management capabilities. I am not thrilled with building profiles of employees within an organization. I am pretty relaxed when it comes to collaboration. Phones work pretty well. Email is okay too. I work on documents alone and provide a version for authorized individuals to review. I need no big gun system necessary needed. Just a modern one.
What about Fast Search?
Let me highlight a few salient points:
- The product originated in Norway. You know where Trondheim is, right? Oslo? Of course. Great in the winter too. The idea burst from academia prior to 1998, when the company was officially set up. That makes the architecture an agile, youthful 17 years old.
- In 2008, Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for a company which was found wanting in its accountancy skills. After investigations and a legal proceeding, the company seems to have had revenues well below its reported $170 million in 2007. Until the HP Autonomy deal, this was a transaction that helped fuel the “search is a big payday” belief. At an estimated $60 million instead of $170, Microsoft paid about 20 times Fast Search’s 2007 earnings. After the legal eagles landed, the founder of Fast Search found himself on the wrong end of a court decision. Think lock up time.
- Fast Search is famous for me because its founder told me that he was abandoning Web search for the enterprise search market. Autonomy’s revenue seemed to be a number the founder thought was reachable. As time unspooled, the big pay day arrived for Google. Enterprise search did not work out in terms of Google scale numbers. Fast Search backed out of an ad model to pursue an academic vision of information access as the primary enterprise driver.
- The Fast Search solution which is part of SharePoint has breathed life into dozens of SharePoint search add ins. These range from taxonomy systems to clustering components to complete snap in replacements for the Fast Search components. Hundreds upon hundreds of consultants make their living implementing, improving, and customizing search and retrieval for SharePoint.
Net net: SharePoint has more than 150 million licensees. SharePoint is the new DOS for the enterprise. SharePoint is a consultant’s dream come true.
For me, I prefer simpler and more recent technology. That 17 year old approach seems more like Jack Benny’s Maxwell than a modern search Kia Soul.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2015
Enterprise Search: Search No Longer Big Enough
September 22, 2015
I read the news on LinkedIn. (Registration may be required, gentle reader.) A post by a forum moderator raised the question, “Should be expand enterprise search?” There are other signs of trouble in search land as well. The Paper.Li enterprise search curated newsletter is about Big Data, analytics, education, and—almost as an afterthought—enterprise search in the form of endlessly recycled references to mid tier consulting reports based on what are in my opinion subjective criteria.
Is the implosion of enterprise search complete? Has the shockwave of the Fast Search financial charade caught up with today’s vendors? Is the shadow of the billion dollar bust that was HP’s acquisition of Autonomy/Verity been the straw which broke the camel’s back? Was it the mid tier consulting firm’s enterprise search report which ignored the major player in open source information access? Was it the constant repositioning, faux news releases, and posturing on webinars the karate chop across the throat of search marketers?
I don’t know.
From my point of view, there are high value solutions to the challenge of providing employees with access to certain types of content. One can use the appliance approach of Maxxcat? There is Elasticsearch? The Blossom Software solution is pretty darned good. Specialist solutions are available for parts. There are even semi automated systems to help a user make sense of the noise filled streams of social media content. Think Recorded Future.
Gentle reader, starting in 2003 when I began work on the Enterprise Search Report, sponsored by, of all things, a content management specialist, there were some brand leaders. But these have fallen into disgrace, been absorbed into larger firms with little incentive to invest in research, or crashed and burned as a result of failed implementations.
What remains today are some grim facts:
- Search is perceived by many information technology professionals as a problem. Enterprise search implementations are often doomed from the git go because few want to hook their careers to projects which have for decades failed to keep users happy and been unable to provide useful results without constant infusions of money, computing cycles, and whiz kids.
- Open source solutions are available, and they are pretty good. Large companies have the time, staff, resources, and incentive to get away from the proprietary solutions which limit what the licensee can do with the system.
- Search is an inclusion in the most advanced systems. Consider Recorded Future, Diffeo, or any other cyber centric, next generation system. System is available, but these systems solve specific problems. Search is sort of an apple pie, mother, and love type solution. These generalizations are tough to apply in a business like manner in organizations struggling to pay their bills. Most organizations just use what’s available? Even AutoCAD includes a search function. Oracle, bless its proprietary heart, provides a database licensee with a good enough solution. For those wanting a more robust solution, the Secure Enterprise Search system is available without charge. Yikes.
In my own experience, the sins of the earliest enterprise search vendors like Fulcrum Technologies and Verity have bulldozed a highway built on quicksand. Today’s vendors talk about search in terms of buzzwords like these:
- Customer support. The idea is a variation of ClearForest’s pitch that one can find answers to customer issues by indexing text.
- Big Data. I am confident that when I look for information in a Big Data set, I want to use search as a secondary tool. Enterprise search vendors offer analytic routines as add ons or as spin on counting terms which have been extracted.
- Taxonomy. I love this concept. A company needs to index its content. Nothing improves search, which has not been improved too much in the last 50 years, like machine indexing. Just don’t pin down the vendor on the amount of human intervention that is required to keep the automated system on track.
- Natural language processing, semantics, and artificial intelligence. The idea is that a search system with smart software can figur4e out what a human generated document means and make it available to a user easily or, in some cases, BEFORE the user knows she needs access to the information in that document.
There are three problems which vendors and their customers have to wrestle into submission.
First, vendor and customer have to agree on exactly what the information access system is supposed to do. In my experience, this is an important step which is usually given modest, if any, attention. The reason is that instead of narrowing the focus to a specific problem, the problem gets defined in ever widening circles of functionality. The result is cost overruns and disaffected users.
Second, the vendors’ marketing argues that certain functions and benefits are a consequence of installing their software. The flaw is that marketing is easy; implementing a search system which the customer can afford to maintain is very hard. Add to this disconnect the characteristic of some vendors to sell software which is half baked, or, in some cases, not even completed. A certain vendor was kicked off a government procurement list for getting caught with software that did not work.
Third, the customers know that finding information is important. Most enterprise search vendors cannot provide access to the type of content which is growing rapidly and gaining importance with each passing day. I am talking about indexing audio, video, social media generated by employees and contractors, and digital images. The focus has been for a half century on text. That does not work particularly well if one does not select a solution from a handful of vendors with solutions that actually work. Need I repeat Blossom, Elastic, and Maxxcat?
What about today’s flagship vendors? If one embraces the analysis of the mid tier consulting firms, the solutions are ones that are proprietary and have some profile and money due to the ministrations of addled venture capital players looking for the next Google.
There are solutions. Until the LinkedIn pool of job hunters and consultants comes to grip with software that works in a reliable manner, it is unlikely that the enterprise search discussion on LinkedIn will rise above thinly veiled marketing.
Search, gentle reader, is important. There are solutions which work. The problem is that in today’s go go world, those with a veneer of knowledge and expertise are guided by individuals who may be failed webmasters, unemployed journalists, English majors, and self appointed experts.
I have no solution to the crisis in enterprise search. Google muffed the bunny. Microsoft has its Powerset and Fast Search technologies. IBM offers Watson.
Maybe these solutions will work for you. They won’t work for me. Search experts, crisis time. My vantage point is from rural Kentucky. The experts in Manhattan and San Francisco have a much better view. What they see, however, is quite different from what I observe. Just make search bigger. The problems will just fade away, right? Grass is easy to grow in scorched earth, correct?
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2015
Oracle Revenues: Implications for HP and IBM
September 17, 2015
Oracle is an interesting company because it owns a number of enterprise search and content processing technologies. For example, decades ago, the company bought the often overlooked Artificial Linguistics. Then Oracle complemented its “Text” and “Secure Enterprise Search” technology with Triple Hop. Gentle reader, I am confident you know about Triple Hop’s clustering methods. Then in a spate of content processing fury, Oracle bought RightNow (Dutch developed indexing technology), InQuira (natural language processing crafted from two early Sillycon Valley search vendors), and Endeca, the now long in the tooth, computationally intensive “Guided Navigation” outfit. And we must not forget the retrieval functions of PL/SQL. Oracle has almost as many search and retrieval systems to nurture as that high flying OpenText outfit in Canada.
With such a backpack of information access goodies, should we expect a revenue report bursting with good news? It struck me as I read “Oracle Beats Profit Estimates by a Penny a Share but Revenue Slides” that search and retrieval may not be a zoo with golden geese.
Oracle delivered earnings which made the fine Wall Street MBAs glow. However, the revenue did not win a gold star.
Set aside Oracle for the nonce.
Think about Hewlett Packard (Autonomy stuff) and IBM (Watson stuff). Both of these outfits are reporting declining revenues too. Both have bet large sums on information access.
My question is, “Will a payoff arrive?”
My other question is, “When the payoff arrives, will it make up for the loss in revenues from old line products and services?”
My hunch is that these big bets on search are current and future ponds of despair.
Now set aside these floundering blue chips.
What about the up and coming search vendors? Life is not easy for vendors of search and content processing technology. There are some bright spots, of course, but vendors with deep roots in traditional search craziness are likely to find revenues insufficient to pay for customer support, bug fixing, and implementation of new technical methods.
Google before its founders did an arabesque into Alphabet figured this out with the high interest credit card of technical debt. When will HP, IBM, and Oracle get the message?
Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2015
Smartlogic Chops at the Gordian Knot of the Semantic Web
September 5, 2015
This semantic Web thing just won’t take a nap. The cheerleaders for the Big Data and analytics revolutions are probably as annoyed as I am. Let’s face it. Semantic was a good buzzword years ago. The problem remains that anything to do with indexing, taxonomies, ontologies, and linguistics lacks sizzle.
If you want analytics, you definitely want predictive analytics. (I agree.Who wants those tired Statistics 101 methods when Kolmogorov-Arnold methods are available. Not me, that’s one of my relatives. I am the dumb Arnold.)
If you want data, you want Big Data. The notion of having large volumes of zeros and ones to process in real time is more exciting than extracting a subset which meets requirements for validity and then doing historical analyses. The real time thing is where it is at.
I read “The Promise of the Semantic Web, Truth of Fiction?” hoping for an epiphany. Failing that high water mark of intellectual insight, I would have been satisfied with a fresh spin on an old idea. No joy.
I read:
Semantic technologies have the capacity to extract meaning from unstructured information found within an enterprise and make them available for processing. Our new Semaphore 4 platform combines the power of semantic technologies with our ontology management, auto classification, and semantic enhancement server to help organizations identify, classify and tag their content in order to use the intelligence within it to manage their business.
The information strikes me as a bit of the old rah rah for a specific product. The system is proprietary. The licensee must perform some work to allow the “platform” to deliver optimum outputs.
What about the answer to the question of a promise as truth or fiction?
The answer is to license a proprietary product. I am okay with that, but when the title of the write up purports to tackle an issue of substance and deflects substantive analysis with a sales pitch, I realize that I am out of step with the modern methods.
Here’s my take on the question about the semantic Web.
Folks, the semantic Web thing is a reality. A number of outfits have been employing semantic methods for years. The semantics, however, are plumbing and out of site. The companies pitching RDF, Owl, and other conventions are following a wave which built, formed, and crashed on the shore years ago.
At this time, next generation information access vendors incorporate linguistic and semantic methods in their plumbing. The particular pipe and joint are not elevated to be the solution. The subsystems and their components are well understood, readily available methods.
As a result, one gets semantics with systems from Diffeo, Recorded Future, and other innovators.
The danger with asking a tough question and then answering it with somewhat stale information is that someone may come along and say, “There are vendors who are advancing the state of the art with innovative solutions.”
That is the main reason that MIT and Google have funded these NGIA (next generation information access) outfits. Innovation is more than asking a question, not answering it, and delivering a sales pitch for a component. Not too useful to me, gentle reader.
I would suggest that the Gordian knot is in the mind of the semantic solution marketer, not the mind of a prospect with a real time content problem for which modern technology enables effective solutions.
Stephen E Arnold, September 5, 2015
Oracle Suggests a PeopleSoft Upgrade
September 2, 2015
PeopleSoft is a popular human resources management software and like all software it occasionally needs to be upgraded. TriCore Solutions suggests that instead of using Verity, your next upgrade to PeopleSoft should be the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES). TriCore Solutions brags about helping clients upgrade to SES in the article, “Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) And PeopleSoft 9.2.”
Oracle SES offers a secure, high-quality search across all enterprise platforms as well as analytics, intuitive search interface, secure crawling, indexing, and searching. When SES is deployed into an enterprise system it also offers several key capabilities:
- “Connectivity to Legacy Repositories. SES allows companies to access their most valuable assets – information about its specific business, its processes, products, customers, and documents that previously resided in proprietary repositories. Connectors include interfaces for EMC Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus Notes, Oracle‘s E-Business Suite and Oracle Siebel among others.
- Security: The ability to search password protected sources securely. Oracle‘s search technology provides single-sign-on (SSO) based security where available, and can also employ application-specific security where SSO is not available.
- High quality search results: Brings for the Intranet a high level of relevance that users associate with Internet searches.
- Going beyond keywords. As the volume of information grows, users need advanced search techniques like the ability to categorize and cluster search results for iterative navigation.”
It is evident that Oracle SES offers a comprehensive search feature to PeopleSoft and maybe a better product, but what does Verity have to offer?
Whitney Grace, September 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
More Enterprise Search Revisionism: Omitted Companies Are the Major News
August 24, 2015
A flurry of news items hit my Overflight system in the last couple of days. Gartner, one of the expert for hire mid tier consulting firms, issued a “Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search.” I am not sure if you can access the report. I had to log in to LinkedIn and work through various screens until this gem presented itself to me.
I followed the link and learned that the “Magic Quadrant for 2015” includes these firms:
The Challengers. To me a challenger means a person or thing that engages in any contest, as of skill, strength, etc.
- LucidWorks, founded in 2007
- Mindbreeze, a unit of Microsoft centric Fabasoft in Austria. The search unit fired up a decade ago
- Google, ah, dear old Google and its pricey Google Search Appliances. You can find the license fees for some devices via the GSAAdvantage service. Google has been sort of selling GSAs for a decade.
- Dassault Systems, yep, the French engineering outfit working to convert Exalead’s ageing technology into a product component solution. Exalead dates from 2000. Yikes, that makes the technology 15 years old, an aeon in technology time.
The good news is that LucidWorks has its roots in open source. The other three outfits are proprietary technology.
The second group is Niche Players. The companies in this sector are:
- Expert System. An outfit which opened its doors in 1992 and whose stock is publicly traded. The share price on August 23, 2015 was $2.13 a share
- Recommind, founded in year 2000, is a legal system whose technical approach often reminds me of Autonomy’s systems and methods. The firm was founded in 2000 and now, according to this story, has $70 million in revenue
- Squiz, which is, by golly, not an open source solution despite its origins in the 2001 P@noptic academic/research setting in Australia. Just try searching for that spelling “P@noptic.”
The third group is Visionaries which to me means “given to or characterized by fanciful, not presently workable, or unpractical ideas, views, or schemes.” The dictionary entry here also points out these clarifications: unreal, imaginary, idealistic, impractical, and unrealizable. Here are the search outfits in this category:
- BA Insight. This is an company founded in 2004. The founder raised some venture money and then found himself looking for his future elsewhere. In the presentations I have heard, BA Insight is [a] an enterprise search system replacement for whatever you have running, [b] a business intelligence system, [c] a metatagging machine, [d] some combination of these functions.,
- IBM. Ah, dear, old IBM. The company does the home grown thing with scripts and algorithms from its research labs. IBM was founded in It does the open source thing by building in 1911. The company has had a long time to figure out what to do since the STAIRS III and Web Fountain days. Now IBM search means use of open source, community supported, free Lucene. Plus, It does the acquisition thing with SPSS Clementine (remember than, gentle reader), Vivisimo, i2, and Cybertap, among other information access companies IBM has purchased. At the end of the day, I am not sure what search means because IBM has been promoting the heck out of Watson. You remember Watson. It was a TV game show winner. Watson wrote a cook book. Watson is curing cancer. Watson is doing all sorts of wonderful things. I suppose that’s why it is a visionary with 13 consecutive quarters of revenue decline.
- IHS (Information Handling Service. IHS leverages technology from The Invention Machine (founded in 1992) an acquisition built to locate systems and methods from patent documents. The IHS search system is called Goldfire and positioned as an enterprise search system. IHS, according to Attivio, licenses the Fast Search & Transfer influenced UIA technology platform. IHS for me is a publishing company, but I suppose that doesn’t matter in today’s fluid world.
The final group of search vendors is labeled leaders. So what’s a leader? According to my online dictionary, a leader is a person or thing that leads. And “lead” means to go before or with to show the way; conduct or escort. No, I will not refer to Ashley Madison, gentle reader. I will play this straight. The leaders are:
- Attivio, founded in 2007. It must be a leader because a “visionary” uses the Attivio technology to be a visionary. Is that self referential like articles about Google’s right to be forgotten which must be forgotten?
- Coveo, founded in 2004. This company has been, like Attivio, successful in attracting venture capital.The company once focused on Microsoft Windows as did BA Insight. Now the firm is into customer support but the mid tier consultants remember the good old days of enterprise search.
- Hewlett Packard. Ah, HP, the company wrote a check for $11 billion in 2011, promptly wrote off billions, and embarked on a much loved legal challenge to Dr. Michael Lynch and some other favored individuals. HP, like IBM, has been racking up declining revenues for five consecutive quarters and is in the process of dividing itself into two separate companies. Does this suggest that HP some challenges? Keep in mind Autonomy was founded in the mid 1990s.
- Lexmark. This is a relative newcomer to enterprise search. The company bought Brainware of trigram fame. Lexmark bought the 1980s search darling ISYS Search Software, which was founded in 1988. The company also snagged Kofax, which got into the content processing game with its acquisition of Kapow. I did hear that Lexmark is looking at some shortfalls related to search and content processing. I reported on the chopping of 500 jobs a couple of months ago. But leaders must expect some setbacks like Hewlett Packard. Perhaps Lexmark will reveal the shortfall from its “search related” endeavors. I would peg the number somewhere in the $75 to $80 million range in the last 18 months.
- Sinequa. This marketing centric, social media maven was founded in 2002. The company has some big European clients, but I am not certain that the push into the US has met with the “name in lights” success some French stakeholders expected. Sinequa is obviously a leader in search. I classify the company as a business process outfit, but the mid tier consultants are more informed than an old guy in rural Kentucky.
My view of the enterprise search sector is different.The companies in this list are oldies, a couple dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Let’s see. In Internet time, that pegs some technology as prehistoric.,
There is a notable omission too. The list of companies identified by the mid tier outfit has missed the company which has been driving a bulldozer through deals.
What company is that?
Elastic, gentle reader. This outfit is in the process of providing the folks at Goldman Sachs with some information access love. The company has shoved aside the Lucid Works outfit which is scrambling to reposition itself as a Big Data spark something. There are cloud versions of Elastic available for a darned reasonable price. Check out SearchBlox, for example. Keep in mind that Elasticsearch was a second act to Compass, another search system.
A question which I asked myself is, “Why has a mid tier outfit which is so darned expert in enterprise search overlooked the big dog?” Frankly I have no evidence other than the odd little grid in the Linked In post. I assume that the experts at the mid tier firms don’t know much about what’s happening in search. Another thought is that the Elastic folks don’t buy much third party expert input about search. Whatever the reason, I suggest you, gentle reader, become familiar with Elasticsearch in the free or for fee variant.
Another gap I noticed is the omission of the appliance folks. Right off the bat, I think Index Engines, Maxxcat, and Thunderstone deserve a tiny footnote. Maxxcat, for example, is pretty good in the enterprise content indexing arena. Buy a box and plug it in. Index Engines does a great job making some specialized content instantly accessible. And Thunderstone? Well, the company has some darned good technology.
A third lacuna is the omission of the wild and crazy, Fast Search & Transfer tinged SharePoint search. There are upwards of 150 million SharePoint installations. Like it or not, Microsoft also shoves search down my throat each time I use Windows 10. Yikes. The system may have a legacy of considerable interest, but the darned thing is out there. Maybe a teeny tiny footnote? I would suggest that the mid tier outfit identify the vendor which sells more search into Microsoft installations than any other vendor. Nope. I won’t identify this outfit. The president agreed to a Search Wizards Speak interview and then backed out. Too bad for him. No life preserver from me again.
What’s the value of this league table or grid thing from the mid tier consulting firm.
First, it allows the companies in the list to issue a news release. I have already seen references to some of the companies. This post was inspired by the junk mail Linked In shoots at me on a regular basis. There’s nothing like PR which gets a company’s name in front of a bunch of red hot prospects.
Second, the mid tier consulting firm can visit with each company. I can imagine that on those visits, the mid tier consulting firm might just mention the firm’s strategic and tactical for fee services. Hey, if I worked for a mid tier consulting firm, I would be sure to explain why retaining me was the best darned thing since sliced bread. Oh, wait. I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton before it drifted into Snowden drifts. I responded to requests; I don’t recall making sales calls. Life is different now I suppose.
Third, the mid tier reports practically force me to write blog posts. I am delighted to be spurred into action.
Fourth, how much does it cost to use these systems? Why not make a table which presents the name of the company, the search system name so that I know what IBM asserts actually performs enterprise search and what HP calls its cloud stuff with Autonomy made ever so easy? Why not states that such and such a search system begins at $X for the license fee and $Y for the on going support, upgrades, and maintenance? Why not present average hourly engineering and technical service fees? Hey, even the best of this animal shelter of disparate systems fail. Did I say crash? Did I say flame out? Did I say deliver irrelevant results? Well, often in my experience.
To wrap up, the Visionaries, the Challengers, the Leaders, and the Niche Players can output news releases. Some my try to dismiss my observations, which is just peachy keen with me. I assume that failed webmasters, thwarted academicians, and unemployed home economics majors will explain that the best of the best appear in the league table.
Present reality any way one wants. I don’t have to make this stuff work anymore. I don’t have to explain to the CFO why the costs associated with enterprise search will continue to go up until the system is removed from the company. I will no longer have to attend a conference filled with cheerleaders for a utilitarian technology which most companies have learned is pretty much the same as it has been since the days of Fulcrum and Verity.
Remember. This is 2015. Most of the technology presented in the mid tier report is getting old. The world wants mobile. The world wants predictive outputs. The world wants search which actually delivers relevant results.
Maybe that is secondary today?
Will I read the complete report if a copy becomes available to me?
Nah. Marketing stuff bores me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2015
Do Search and CMS Deliver a Revenue Winner?
August 21, 2015
I spotted a write up called “Look for Enterprise Search, Analytics and These ECM Leaders for Your Transactional Content.” I found the article darned amazing even for public relations about a mid tier consulting firm and one of its analyses.
The main point of the article is that analysts have analyzed enterprise software and identified vendors who provide “ECM Transactional Content Services.” Fabricating collections of objects and slapping a jargon laded label on the batch is okay with me.
Empty calories await you, gentle reader.
What struck me as interesting was this statement:
Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Craig Le Clair points to key advancements and opportunities by the leading ECM providers to help enterprises realize greater value in these systems:
- Ramping analytics to drive insight and reduce administrative burden
- Accelerating their move to cloud
- Improved search and content sharing
- Using stronger and more open application program interfaces (APIs) that spur innovation
- Moving quickly to fill gaps in their mobile road maps.
Notice the “ECM”. The acronym refers to software which provides editing, access, and publishing functions to its users. The idea, it seems, is that an employee will write a memo and the ECM will keep track of the document. In practice, based on my experience, the ECM recipe usually fails to satisfy my hunger.
ECM and its close cousins in acronym land are similar to the approach articulated by my kindergarten teacher more than half century ago. She said, according to my mother, “Keep your mittens and lunch in your cubby.” The spirit of the kindergarten teacher lives on in enterprise content management systems.
Unfortunately those who have work to do often create content using tools suited for a specific task. For an engineer, that tool might be Solidworks. Bench chemists are often confused when an ECM is described as the tool for their work. One chemist said to me after an enthusiastic presentation by an information technology person, “I work with chemical structures. What’s this person talking about?” Lawyers in the midst of big risk litigation want to use their own and often flawed document systems. Even the marketer who cheers for ECM for Web content parks some high value data in that wonderful Adobe creative cloud with some back up data on iCloud. I have spotted a renegade analyst with an off the books workstation equipped with an Australian text processing and search system. USA.gov is notable for what is not available because executive brand entities roll their own content solutions.
I was able to review a copy of the consultant report upon which the article was based. Wowza. The write up assembled a grad bag of widely disparate companies, added three cups of buzzwords, and output mixed in one kilo of MBAisms.
To be fair, the report identified “challenges.” These items baffled me. For example, “Deep experience in key transactional applications.” This is a challenge, really?
But the vendors in the report are able to “address emerging opportunities.” Okay, so these are not opportunities. The opportunities are emerging. Hmmm. Here’s an example: “Ramping analytics to drive insight and reduce administrative burden.” Yikes. Ramping analytics. Driving analytics. Reducing administrative burden. Very active stuff this ECM. Gerund alert. Gerund alert.
What companies are into this suite of challenges and emerging opportunities? Here’s the list of the mid tier touted stallions from the ECM stable:
- EMC, a company which is considering having a subsidiary of itself purchase the parent company. Folks, when a company does this type of recursive stuff, the core business might be a little bit uncertain.
- HP. Yep, an outfit which has lost its way, suffered five consecutive quarters of declining revenue, and bought a company for $11 billion and then wrote off most of that expense because the sellers of the company fooled HP, its consultants, accountants, and lawyers. Okay. A winner for the legal eagles maybe.
- IBM. Heaven help me. IBM has suffered declining revenues for 13 consecutive quarters, annoyed me with a blizzard of Watson silliness, and spent lots of time getting rid of businesses. I have a difficult time believing that IBM can manage enterprise content. But, hey, that’s just my rural Kentucky ignorance, right?
- Laserfiche. The company offers a “flexible, proven enterprise content management system. I believe this statement. The company was founded in 1987 and sure seems to have its roots in well seasoned technology. The company has lots of customers and lots of award. The only hitch in the git along is that I never ran across this outfit in my work. Bad luck I guess.
- Lexmark. Folks, let us recall the rumor that Lexmark and its content businesses are not money makers. I heard that the content cluster achieved an astounding $70 to $80 million shortfall. Who knows if this rumor is accurate. I do know that Lexmark is cutting staff, and one does not take this drastic step unless one needs to reduce costs pronto.
- M Files. I never heard of this outfit. I did a quick check of my files and learned that the company “helps enterprises find, share, and secure documents and information. Even in highly regulated industries.” The company is also “passionate about productivity.” The outfit relies on dtSearch for information access. This is okay because dtSearch can process most of the content within a Microsoft-centric environment. But M Files strikes me as a different type of outfit from HP or IBM. As I flipped through the information I had collected, the company struck me as a collection of components. Assembly required.
- Newgen Software. Another newbie for me. The company was in my Overflight archive. The firm provides BPM (business process management), ECM (enterprise content management), DMS (I have no idea what this acronym means), CCM (I have no idea what this acronym means), and workflow (I thought this was the same as BPM). The company operated from New Delhi. My thought? Another collection of components with assembly in someone’s future.
- Hyland OnBase. This is the third outfit on the list about which I have a modest amount of information. The company says that it is a “leader in ECM.” I believe it. The firm’s url is the same as its flagship product. The company was founded in 1991 and created OnBase, which is a plus. After 25 years, the darned thing should work better than a Rube Goldberg solution assembled from a box of components.
- OpenText. Okay, OpenText is a company which has more search engines and content processing systems than most Canadian firms. The challenge at OpenText is having enough cash to invest in keeping the diverse assortment of systems current. Which of these systems is the one referenced in the mid tier firm’s report? SGML search, BASIS, BRS, Nstein, the Autonomy stub in RedDot, Nstein, Fulcrum, or some other approach? Details can be important.
- Unisys. Okay, finally a company that is essentially an integrator which still supports Burroughs mainframes. Unisys can implement systems because it is an integrator. For government work, Unisys matches the statement of work to available software. Although some might question this statement, Unisys can implement almost any kind of system eventually.
Several observations:
First, enterprise content management is a big and fuzzy concept. The evidence of this is the number of acronyms some of the companies use to explain what they do. I assume that it is my ignorance which prevents me from understanding exactly how scanning, indexing, retrieval, repurposing, workflow, and administrative functions work in a cost constrained, teleworker, mobile gizmo world.
Second, open source is knocking on the door of this sector. At some point, organizations will tire of the cost and complexity of collections of loosely federated and integrated software subsystems and look for an alternative. Toss in the word Big Data, and there will be a stampede of New Age consultants ready to step forward and reinvent these outfits. Disruption is probably less of a challenge than the challenge of keeping existing revenues from doing the HP, IBM, and Lexmark drift down.
Third, the search function seems to be a utility or an after thought. The only problem is that search does not work particularly well in an enterprise where the workers log in from Starbucks and try to interact with enterprise software from a Blackberry.
Fourth, what an odd collection of outfits? HP, IBM, and Lexmark along with 30 year old imaging firms plus some small outfits. Maybe the selection of firms makes sense to you, gentle reader. For me, the report make evident the struggles of some experts in ECM, BPM, and the acronyms I know zero about.
In short, this mid tier report strikes me as a russische punschtorte. On the surface, the darned thing looks good, maybe mouth watering. After a chomp or two, I want a paprikahenderl.
This ECM thing is a confection, not a meaty chicken. Mixing in search does nothing for the recipe.
Stephen E Arnold, August 22, 2015
Enterprise Search: You Cannot Do It Yourself, People.
July 31, 2015
I love write ups like “Don’t Settle When It Comes to Enterprise Search Platforms.” These articles are designed to make consulting firms with the marketing flim flam which positions each as an “expert” in enterprise information access. I would not be surprised to find copies of this article in the peddler kit of search sales professionals.
The main point of the write up is that enterprise search is a “platform.” Because there are options, no self respecting company will try to implement search without the equivalent of the F Troop in mid tier or below consultants.
I noted:
Let’s look at two very common workarounds some have tried, and then we will talk about why you must go with a reputable developer when you make your final decision.
When I read this, I wondered if the “expert” were familiar with the Maxxcat line of enterprise search systems or the Blossom hosted solution.
The write up dismisses an open source solution apparently unaware of research by Diomidis Spinellis and Vaggelis Giannikas work published in Journal of Systems and Software, March 2012, pages 666 to 682. That’s okay. My hunch is that those finding the “Don’t Settle” article compelling are not likely to be interested in researchy type stuff.
One of the more interesting segments in the write up is the assertion that scalability is a “given.” Hmmm. In my experience, there are some on going enterprise search challenges: Scalability is one facet of a nest of vipers which includes my favorite reptile indexing latency.
The article states:
Open source platforms are only as scalable as their code allows, so if the person who first made it didn’t have your company’s needs in mind, you’ll be in trouble. Even if they did, you could run into a problem where you find out that scaling up actually reveals some issues you hadn’t encountered before. This is the exact kind of event you want to avoid at all costs.
I don’t want to rain on this parade of “information,” but every enterprise search system which I have had the pleasure of procuring, managing, investigating, and analyzing has scalability problems.
The reason is simple: The volume of changed information and the flow of new information goes up. Whatever one starts with is rather rapidly choked. The solutions are painful: Spend more or index less.
I am not confident that one who follows the advice of certain experts will find his or her enterprise search journey pleasant. On the other hand, there are opportunities as Uber drivers one can pursue.
Stephen E Arnold, July 31, 2015
IBM and Its Federated Search Camelot
July 25, 2015
Short honk: I scanned my Twitter feed this morning. What did I see? An impossible assertion from the marketing crazed folks at IBM Watson. Let me tell you, IBM Watson and its minions output a hefty flow of tweets. A year or so ago, IBM relied on mid tier consulting firms experts like Dave Schubmehl (yep, the fellow who sold my research on Amazon without my permission). Now there are other voices.
But the message, not just the medium, are important. IBM’s assertion is that there will be no more “data silos in enterprise search.” You can learn about IBM’s “reality” in a webcast.
Now, I am not planning on sitting through a webcast. I would, however, like to enumerate several learnings from my decades of enterprise information access work. You can use this list as a jump start for your questions to the IBM wizards. Here goes:
- In an enterprise, what happens when an indexing system makes available in a federated search system information to a legal matter which is not supposed to be available to anyone except the attorneys involved in the matter?
- In an enterprise, what happens if information pertinent to a classified government project is made available in a federated search system which has not be audited for access control compliance?
- What happens when personnel information containing data about a medical issue is indexed and made available in an enterprise search system when email attachments are automatically indexed?
- How does the federated system deal with content in servers located in a research facility engaged in new product research?
- What happens when sales and pricing data shared among key account executives is indexed and made available to a contractor advising the company?
- What is the process for removing pointers to data which are not supposed to be in the enterprise search system?
- What security measures are in place to ensure that a lost or stolen mobile device does not have access to an enterprise search system?
- How much manual work is required before an organization turns on the Watson indexing system?
These will get you started on the cross silo issues?
Oh, the answer to these questions is that the person identified as responsible for making the data available may get to find a future elsewhere. Amazon warehouses are hiring in southern Indiana.
Alternatively one can saddle up a white stallion, snag a lance, and head for the nearest windmill.
Stephen E Arnold, July 25, 2015
Plethora of Image Information
July 24, 2015
Humans are visual creatures and they learn and absorb information better when pictures accompany it. In recent years, the graphic novel medium has gained popularity amongst all demographics. The amount of information a picture can communicate is astounding, but unless it is looked for it can be hard to find. It also cannot be searched by a search engine…or can it? Synaptica is in the process of developing the “OASIS Deep Image Indexing Using Linked Data,”
OASIS is an acronym for Open Annotation Semantic Imaging System, an application that unlocks image content by giving users the ability to examine an image closer than before and highlighting data points. OASIS is linked data application that enables parts of the image to be identified as linked data URIS, which can then be semantically indexed to controlled vocabulary lists. It builds an interactive map of an image with its features and conceptual ideas.
“With OASIS you will be able to pan-and-zoom effortlessly through high definition images and see points of interest highlight dynamically in response to your interaction. Points of interest will be presented along with contextual links to associated images, concepts, documents and external Linked Data resources. Faceted discovery tools allow users to search and browse annotations and concepts and click through to view related images or specific features within an image. OASIS enhances the ability to communicate information with impactful visual + audio + textual complements.”
OASIS is advertised as a discovery and interactive tool that gives users the chance to fully engage with an image. It can be applied to any field or industry, which might mean the difference between success and failure. People want to fully immerse themselves in their data or images these days. Being able to do so on a much richer scale is the future.
Whitney Grace, July 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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