Trifles in Enterprise Search History
May 6, 2014
Search conferences are, in my experience, context free. The history of enterprise search is interesting and contains useful examples pertaining to findability. Stephen E Arnold’s new video is “Trifles from Enterprise Search History.” The eight minute video reviews developments from the late 1970s and early 1980s. These mini snapshots provide information about where some of the hottest concepts today originated. Do you think MarkLogic invented an XML data management system that could do search and analytics? The correct answer may be Titan Search. What about “inventing” an open source search business model. Do you think Lucid Imagination, now Lucid Works, cooked up the concept of challenging proprietary systems with community created software? The correct answer may be Fulcrum Technologies’ early concoction of home brew code with the WAIS server. What about the invention of jargon that permeates discussions of content processing. A good example is a “parametric cube”. Is this the conjuring of Spotfire and Palantir? Verity is, in Mr. Arnold’s view, the undisputed leader in this type of lingo in its attempts to sell search without using the word “search.” Grab some SkinnyPop and check out Trifles.
Kenneth Toth, May 6, 2014
IBM Watson Staff Changes: Off to a VC
March 2, 2014
I was traveling when the Wall Street Journal story “Watson Head’s Departure Raises Questions About IBM Moonshot” appeared. (This story may be behind the WSJ paywall, gentle reader.)
Nevertheless, I wanted to post my view of this interesting staff change. The main point of the story is that Manoj Saxena, once “head” of the Watson project, allegedly abandoned IBM Watson for greener pastures.
According to the write up, IBM said:
Creating an ecosystem of applications based on Watson is a linchpin of IBM’s strategy to turn it into a multi-billion business. Last fall, IBM announced it would open up the Watson technology to software developers in a bid to turn it into a platform much like Apple did with its App Store.
The article pointed out that 20 weeks ago, Manoj Saxena allegedly said:
“In my mind, this is the key to growing Watson to $10 billion,” said Saxena on the October conference call. “It is a tall order, but I think we can do it.”
Perhaps it is easier to assist IBM from outside the company? Perhaps someone in Manoj Saxena’s circle of acquaintances pointed out that it took Autonomy 15 years to generate about $850 million in revenue. IBM wants to beat this goal by a factor of 10 in five years?
Search and content processing are markets ripe with opportunities. From the user’s point of view, systems have become obsessed with graphics. But the precision and recall of the niftiest of today’s systems are not much better than technology available 20 years ago. In fact, some of the 20 year old systems are still in use and being sold today. Even Google is getting on towards 15 year old systems and methods for its Google Search Appliance.
My view is that if Palantir, IBM Watson, and Hewlett Packard are able to hit their revenue goals for their next generation technology—the market with money in hand is going to have to change significantly. Add in the pressure from outfits like Elasticsearch and once promising technologies like those from Coveo, Digital Reasoning, and Lexmark (ISYS Search). There are quite a few companies chasing after available deals. Even Kentucky teens are nosing into the chase. See, for example, http://bit.ly/1gM0j86. Even IBM’s non Watson units like i2 Group are likely to be competing for projects as well.
In a big company, one can get paid to research. When it comes time to sell, suddenly the job shifts from the “ideal” to the “really hard.” This Watson drama is one worth watching. In the case of Manoj Saxena, the better perspective is one from outside IBM.
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2014
PathAR Update
February 24, 2014
One of the goslings dug up additional information on the PathAR company. The firm caught my attention with its assertion that it could identify one specific meaning content object in a large corpus.
The company’s Web site is http://www.pathar.net.
According to an SEC Form D, the executives of the company are:
- Patrick D. Butler
- Andrew Woglom, chief financial officer
- Anthony (Tony) Marshall
- Mark Jacobson.
The address for the company is listed on Form D as:
110 S. Sierra Madre Street
Colorado Springs, CO 80903.
The company is seeking a software development manager and a senior architect/developer.
The CrunchBase profile states that the company provides “leading edge analysis capabilities.”
The firm has received $500,000 in funding.
The company appears to be throwing its hat in the ring with IBM, Palantir, and Recorded Future. With Palantir still pursuing a $9 billion valuation, the smart analytics sector continues to attract innovators and entrepreneurs. The question is, “Are there enough customers to make the dozens of analytics firms profitable?”
Stephen E Arnold, February 24, 2014
Business Intelligence: A Functional Barrier
January 26, 2014
Walls.
I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees. (Robert Frost, Mending Wall)
A reader sent me a link to an item that appeared in Phi Beta Iota. You can find the graphic at http://bit.ly/1d3H3Q4. The original document appeared on 2010 at http://bit.ly/1fnOB2Y. I thought again of walls.
In late 2014, O1Business published a short item that provides more back up for the apparent slow down in some business intelligence markets. You can find that original article at http://bit.ly/1aAgA27. My take on the 01Business story by Marie Jung appeared in December 2013 at http://bit.ly/19VUqH9.
I don’t have a dog in the fight, a cranky neighbor, or a ground swell. There is a LinkedIn thread that contains an assertion that search and content processing are heading toward a cornucopia of sales, revenue, and bliss.
Several observations:
- IBM, despite its $1 billion bet on Watson, essentially a business intelligence system, is struggling to hit its financial targets. IBM, however, is confident that it will make Watson into a multi-billion dollar a year business and much more quickly than Autonomy labored to get close to $1 billion in revenue.
- HP Autonomy is motivated to generate a return on its purchase of IDOL, the Digital Reasoning Engine, and other meaning-based computing technology.
- Palantir, Recorded Future, and other cutting-edge intelligence software vendors are working very hard to generate a return for their stakeholders.
- Incumbents like SAP Business Objects, Oracle, and SAS are ramping up their marketing activities.
Promising companies may find themselves out-gunned in terms of industry clout and marketing revenue. Are we entering a time when there are too few customers and too many purveyors.
So what?
I think the future of consultants and financial professionals who are brokering deals for companies in the business intelligence or “intelligence” sector may be able to sell their consulting and advisory services.
However, I am not confident that most of the companies with software in this “business intelligence” category can generate robust organic growth. Furthermore, I am somewhat skeptical that the claims of vendors making the rounds on the conference circuit can provide hard facts that provide cash-strapped, somewhat cautious prospects that “value” will result from certain types of smart software.
As the diagram prepared by Stephen Few makes clear there is a barrier in business intelligence. The problem in France may be an early warning that the economic malaise exists. Like the passengers on a cruise ship with a mysterious disease, there is not much those affected can do. The vessel has to return to port, disinfect, and start over.
I anticipate considerable acrobatics from business intelligence vendors as they labor to generate organic revenues, differentiate themselves from a legion of me-too providers, and return a payout to their stakeholders.
The recent news assertions that fancy data analysis does not deliver results. I saw one report that used the word “useless.” See http://bit.ly/1n1HjHN)
Strong words, which—obviously—may be incorrect.
Stephen E Arnold, January 26, 2014
A Formula for Selling Content Processing Licenses
January 23, 2014
Do equations sell? Some color:
I know that I received negative feedback when I described the mathematical procedures used for Google’s semantic search inventions. I receive presentations and links to presentations frequently. Few of these contain mathematical expressions. In my forthcoming no-cost discussion of Autonomy from 1996 to 2007, I include one equation. I learned my lesson. Today’s search and content processing truth seekers want training wheels, not higher level math. I find this interesting because as systems become easier to use, the fancy math becomes more important.
Anyway, imagine my surprise when I received a link to a company founded 14 years ago. The outfit does business as Digital Reasoning, and it competes with Palantir (a segment superstar), IBM i2 (the industry leader for relationship analysis), and Recorded Future (backed, in part, by the Google). Dozens of other companies chase revenues in this content processing sector. Today’s New York Times includes a content marketing home run by an outfit called YarcData. You can find this op ed piece by Tim White on page A 23 of the dead tree version of the paper I received this morning (January 23, 2014). Now that’s a search engine optimization Pandas and the Times’s demographic can love.
To the presentation. My link points to Paragon Science at http://slidesha.re/1jpXAGd. I was logged in automatically, so you may have to register to flip through the slide deck.
Navigate to slides 33 and following. Slides 1 to 32 review how text has been parsed for decades. The snappy stuff kicks in on page 33. There are some incomprehensible graphics. These Hollywood style data visualizations are colorful. I, unlike the 20 somethings who devour this approach to information, have a tough time figuring out what I am supposed to glean.
At slide 42, I am introduced to “dynamic cluster analysis.” The approach echoes the methods developed by Dr. Ron Sacks-Davis in the late 1970s and embedded in some of the routines of the 1980 system that a decade later became better known as InQuirion and then TeraText.
At slide 44, the fun begins. Here’s an example which I am sure you will recall from your class in chaos mathematics. If you can’t locate your class notes, you can get a refresher at http://bit.ly/1mKR3G9 courtesy of Cal Tech, home of the easy math classes as I learned during my stint at Halliburton Nuclear Utility Services. The tough math classes were taught at MIT, the outfit that broke new ground in industry sponsored educational methods.
Attivio on the Better Decisions Offensive
January 15, 2014
I read “A Search Engine That ‘Makes’ Data-Driven Business Decisions.” The enamel on the article was about making decisions without old fashioned search.
In the article/interview, Attivio (a user of open source software) positions the company in this way:
Attivio is focused on unifying information. The end goal of big data is to make some insight that is actionable.
I understand. Actionable information. The article explains:
With search engines, there is no concept that one page is linked to another. So, we added a graph engine, a mathematical graph, where there are nodes and links between them. We use the graph to link the results in query A to all possible results in query B. So, it is incredibly fast.
Does this remain anyone other than me of Autonomy’s embedded link invention from six, seven years ago?
Then I learn about the magic:
They put them in front of this interface. When a ticket comes in, they automatically identify the related content across all sources. Now, the sysadmins are happier, the company is happier, and these folks are learning all about this environment that they don’t really need to be trained on.
In short, the system goes beyond search just like IBM Watson, HP Autonomy, Palantir, and dozens of other content processing vendors.
Will Attivio become the next $800 million in revenue search vendor? There are some heavy hitters chasing the same brass ring. So far most search vendors get stuck in under the $100 million glass ceiling. With open source software offering a lower cost option, how will the dozens of information retrieval cum business intelligence systems fare in 2014? Good question. No answers yet.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2014
Business Intelligence: Free Pressures For Fee Solutions
December 14, 2013
I read “KB Crawl sort la tête de l’eau,” published by 01Business. The hook for the article is that KB Crawl, a company harvesting Internet content for business intelligence analyses, has emerged from bankruptcy. Good news for KB Crawl, whose parent company is reported to be KB Intelligence.
The write up contained related interesting information.
First, the article points out that business intelligence services like KB Crawl are perceived as costs, not revenue producers. If this is accurate, the same problem may be holding back once promising US vendors like Digital Reasoning and Ikanow, among others.
Second, the article seems to suggest that for fee business intelligence services are in direct competition with free services like Google. Although Google’s focus on ads continues to have an impact on the relevance of the Google results, users may be comfortable with information provided by free services. Will the same preference for free impact the US business intelligence sector?
Third, the article identifies a vendor (Ixxo) as facing some financial headwinds, writing:
D’autres éditeurs du secteur connaissent des difficultés, comme Ixxo, éditeur de la solution Squido.
But the most useful information in the story is the list of companies that compete with KB Crawl. Some of the firms are:
- AMI Software. www.amisw.com. This company has roots in enterprise search and touts 1500 customers
- Data Observer. www.data-observer.com. The company is a tie up between Asapspot and Data-Deliver. The firm offers “an all-encompassing Internet monitoring and e-reputation services company.”
- Digimind. www.digimind.com. The firm makes sense of social media.
- Eplica. A possible reference to a San Diego employment services firm.
- iScop. Unknown.
- Ixxo. www.ixxo.fr. The firm “develops innovative software applications to boost business responsiveness when faced with unstructured data.”
- Pikko. www.pikko-software.com. A visualization company.
- Qwam. www.qwamci.com. Another “content intelligence” company.
- SindUp. www.sindup.fr. The company offers a monitoring platform for strategic and e reputation information.
- Spotter. www.spotter.com. A company that provides the “power to understand.”
- Synthesio. www.synthesio.com. The company says, “We help brands and agencies find valuable social insights to drive real business value.”
- TrendyBuzz. www.trendybuzz.com. The company lets a client measure “Internet visibility units.”
My view is that 01Busienss may be identifying a fundamental problem in the for fee business intelligence, open source harvesting, and competitive intelligence sector.
Information about business and competitive intelligence that I see in my TRAX Overflight service is mostly of the “power of positive thinking” variety. Companies like Palantir capture attention because the firms are able to raise astounding amounts of funding. Less visible are the financial pressures on the companies trying to generate revenue with systems aimed at commercial enterprises.
If the 01Business article is on the money, what US vendors are like to have their heads under water in 2014? Use the comments section of this blog to identify the stragglers in the North American market.
Stephen E Arnold, December 14, 2013
Yellowfin and Its Business Intelligence Spin
December 7, 2013
I read “Yellowfin Launches Yellowfin 7 Analytics Platform: Makes Enterprise-Wide Data Discovery Easy.” The company’s Web site asserts that Yellowfin is Ranked #1. The page explains that “global BI vendor surveys” attest to this stature. (Please, note that the company’s url is www.yellowfinbi.com, not www.yellowfin.com. The “yellowfin.com” name resolves to a previously owned boat vendor.)
The three reasons for Yellowfin’s stature, according to the company’s Web site, are:
- Ranked number 1 compared to world’s foremost BI vendors. I did not see any links to the referenced studies but I am tired from shoveling snow.
- Standout vendor in emerging, dashboard and innovation categories. I did not see how many other categories were used to rank innovative business intelligence vendors. The snow was heavy and wet. Tough to cut through.
- Challenging traditional BI vendors. I did not see any specifics about how Yellowfin is tackling IBM SPSS, SAS, Recorded Future, Palantir, or Talend, but my fatigue may be contributing to this oversight on my part.
The news I received via email quotes Glen Rabie, Yellowfin CEO, who says:
Yellowfin 7 “delivered beautiful, balanced and brilliant analytics software that makes stunningly simple enterprise-wide Data Discovery easy.”
I like “beautiful,” “brilliant,” and “stunningly simple” analytics. I assume the software alerts the user when the data are corrupted or the analytic method and the information fed into the numerical recipe are mismatched. In my experience, fiddling with numbers and different mathematical procedures can produce some interesting results.
Mr. Rabie continues:
You’ve heard people talk-up self-service BI because of its ability to circumvent the IT bottleneck. With Yellowfin 7, we’ve stepped it up again. We’ve completely redesigned and rebuilt the report authoring process, from the ground up, to enable independent Data Discovery….Yellowfin 7’s new interface for analysis lets you instantly understand the impact of your data selections on the content you’re creating, empowering users to achieve deeper understanding in less time and build the most insightful BI content possible – every time.
The company offers interactive dashboards, collaboration tools, mobile access, and exception reporting. Yellowfin is a “complete BI platform.” Based on the information in the news I received, Yellowfin seems to have overhauled its system rolled out a decade ago.
One observation: The tone and word choice used to describe what looks like an interesting product.
Stephen E Arnold, December 7, 2013
Search Innovations: Revisiting the Past
December 5, 2013
I printed out an article from ReadWrite Web five or six years ago. The story was “Top 17 Search Innovations Outside of Google.” I suggest that anyone tracking Yahoo’s decision to jump back into search or struggling with the dearth of Web search options may want to read this article. I think the list, prepared in May 2007, is a useful reminder of the lack of progress in search.
Let me highlight five of the innovations. These are “breakthroughs” that various search vendors and satraps have explained as the “next big thing.” Well, maybe.
- Personalization. The idea that the user does not see a list of results that are believed to be objective and relevant to the query is fascinating. When vendors filter information, vendors control the information agenda. Quite an innovation. I thought something similar happened in other spheres of interest years ago.
- Algorithm improvement. I like the idea that search has broken free of the algorithms that have been in use since the early days of SDC, SMART, and STAIRS. If the “improvement” erodes precision and recall, is that a good thing? If “improvement” means computational efficiency to reduce costs, is that a better thing?
- Parametric search. Yep, structured query language queries. What’s new? The fact that fewer professionals want to hassle with figuring out a query is fresher than the method itself.
- Semantic search. Does a user understand the upside and downside of semantic search? Do marketers? Oh, yeah.
- Results visualization. Hollywood style outputs have helped Palantir raise lots of money. Does a user know what a visualization “means”? Not too often.
The point is that the ReadWrite list makes clear that no significant progress in search has been made in the last five or six years. Am I missing progress?
To get some details about the dead end for search and content processing, check out the vendor case studies at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles. The similarity among systems, features, and methods is interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2013
Dassault Reaches to Australia New Zealand
September 12, 2013
I have lost track of Dassault, a firm which acquired Exalead a few years ago. Exalead dropped off my radar with its cloud approach to 360 degree information access. I do get an annual request for me to listen without compensation to a “briefing” about the Exalead technology. I have severe webinar fatigue, and I have a tough time differentiating the marketing pitches from different search vendors. As I approach 70 years of age, the diagrams strike me as interchangeable. The terminology used reminds me of a cheerleading session. The PowerPoints are little more than placards saying, “Big Data, Analytics, NoSQL, CRM. Go Team.” The only thing missing from the briefings is a band and hard data about strong revenue and profits generated by the company’s must-have products.
Search is repositioning in an effort to avoid marginalization. Most of the go-to customers already have up to five enterprise search systems. My hunch is that most large organizations are unaware of the total number of “findability” and “business intelligence” systems in their organizations.
Vendors, recognizing a saturated market, have had to either sell out (Brainware, Endeca, Exalead, Fast Search & Transfer, ISYS Search, and Vivisimo) or jump from one buzzword to another in a quest for additional venture funding and revenue.
Cheerleading is show business. Image courtesy of the US Department of Defense at http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=44522
I read “Firstservis Partners Dassault Systèmes to Push Big Data App.” The write up said:
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform brings structure, meaning and accessibility to data across the heterogeneous enterprise information cloud and combines the sophisticated search, access and reporting typically associated with databases with the speed, scalability and simplicity of the Web.
More interesting to me is the reason for this jump to Big Data. According to the write up:
“Their decision to re-platform their business on EXALEAD applications was then validated by Gartner’s 2013 Magic Quadrant Report where the brand was named as the most visionary of enterprise search vendors,” he [Firstservis director, Andrew Young] said.
What I find interesting is that an azure chip consulting firm opened the eyes of Dassault to what it could do with Exalead technology. Now Dassault bought Exalead in 2010 for about $160 million. After three years, a third party has guided a scientific company with 11,000 passionate people, 1790,000 customers, 3,500 (3,501 I suppose if I count Firstservis), and “long term strategy” (See http://www.3ds.com/about-3ds/).
With the pundits and poobahs hoarse from repetition of the “Big Data, Analytics, and CRM” cheer, I found the story interesting and indicative of the challenges those with “enterprise search systems” face.
Will the fans show up for the game? Image courtesy of NOAA at http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/GEOID/GSVS11/images/Longhorn_Stadium_Flippable_Seats.jpg
My hunch is that enterprise search remains a problem. The marketing issue becomes a communication problem. When a company cannot find information, enterprise search is the culprit. Most firms have quite a bit of search experience. Dissatisfaction among users is the norm. So a new positioning is required not just by Dassault but by most of the vendors who used to be in the search business.
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