TIBCO News: Hadoop Support added to Spotfire Analytics
May 21, 2012
Organizations around the globe are experiencing challenges with managing the explosion of big data and meeting the demands of digital consumers. Tech entities are eagerly stepping up and collaborating to develop solutions for these big data challenges, including innovative alternatives to industry standards, like SharePoint.
TIBCO Software Inc. is a provider of infrastructure software for companies to use on-premise or as part of cloud computing environments. Chris Kanaracus recently discussed some TIBCO news in the ComputerWorld.com post, “Tibco adds Hadoop Support to Spotfire Analytics Tool.” The new release is explained:
Spotfire 4.5 will become generally available this month and features a data service connector to Hadoop, which is known for its ability to handle unstructured data such as weblogs, sensor information and text. The connector will allow users to combine and analyze information from Hadoop clusters along with structured data from business applications such as an SAP or Oracle ERP (enterprise resource planning) system.
But some analysts, such as Boris Evelson of Forrester Research, are less than giddy. Evelson adds, “However, other aspects of the release, such as the management tooling and iPad support, are less than earth-shattering.” According to Evelson, mobility has become a basic requirement of any BI platform.
TIBCO’s new partnerships are another indication that enterprise search is the hot new market for competition and development. While acquisition and development news is exciting, you may want to turn to an established search solution that already understands the value of federated search and mobility. We like the feedback we’ve seen about Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Here you can read about the mobility solutions from Mindbreeze,
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile makes company knowledge available on all mobile devices. You can act freely, independently and yet always securely. Irrespective of what format the data is in. Full functionality: Search results are displayed homogenously to the web client with regards to clear design and intuitive navigation.
And with information pairing of your cloud and on-premise data, users can easily access important business information on the go from their smartphones and tablets. The well-established and cost-effective solution is worth a second look at http://www.mindbreeze.com/.
Philip West, May 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Yammer Embraces Search
May 2, 2012
An enterprise social vendor is jumping into search: BrainyardNews announces, “Yammer Update Emphasizes Enterprise, Cloud Search.” Since search vendors are jumping into almost anything with the merest whiff of money, I guess it makes sense for enterprise social network provider Yammer to pursue search. BrainYard editor David F. Carr writes:
“Yammer is introducing ‘universal search,’ along with an option for project or interest groups within a Yammer enterprise social network to sign up for services without necessarily enlisting the company as a whole. . . . To Yammer, universal search makes it possible to search across connections to both enterprise and cloud-based systems integrated with a Yammer network. For example, a search by customer name might turn up automated updates from Salesforce.com, SAP, and a Microsoft SharePoint site, as well as posts by users about that company.”
Uniquely, Yammer saves space by indexing only the metadata coming into a feed, rather than the underlying data, though full-text indexing may appear in the future. The basic social network service is free, and a la carte pricing for premium options gives customers some flexibility.
The new features are part of the spring update Yammer released this month. Other components include: a new tagging method; a Web part that integrates with MS Office 365; updated mobile apps; and the Yammer Embed feature, now moving up from its beta existence.
Launched in 2008, Yammer pioneered the use of secure, private social networks for the purpose of collaboration. More than 80% of Fortune 500 companies currently use the company’s services.
Cynthia Murrell, May 2, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Social Business: Collaboration Trends for 2012
February 27, 2012
Leigh Jasper’s blog series, Collaboration for Grown-ups, reflects a focus on the benefits of enterprise collaboration across supply chains. Jasper, of the ComputerWorld.com Blog, looks at collaboration challenges with big data and the social and mobile forces arriving to the enterprise search world in the first post, “Collaboration Trends for 2012: Part One.”
And as big data becomes a key basis of competition, it will also necessarily become the foundation for new forms of collaboration. In 2012, I believe that more companies will recognize that along with having to deal with storing and analyzing big data, they will need to adopt collaboration platforms capable of capturing, sharing and analyzing it.
With growing data, it is no wonder SharePoint adoption is growing, as well. Of course, 2012 trends could not be discussed without mentioning social and mobile media in the enterprise. With consumer demand for social networking and personal mobile devices driving trends, enterprises are looking to search and analyze this data, such as the conversation between brands and their customers. But the supply chain is also feeling the impact. Jasper suggests that 2012 will see collaboration in the supply chain go beyond email and file sharing and businesses will look to solutions for capturing the many-to-many flow of content.
Business-to-business collaboration development is inevitable as business gets social. To tap into the new possibilities, consider a third party solution to complete your enterprise search system. We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Managing director Michael Hadrian explains the Mindbreeze solution,
Fabasoft Folio Cloud enables quick, secure and mobile collaboration both internally and between international companies. Business processes with customers and partners cannot be realized any quicker or more cost effectively…This enables worldwide connected collaboration and secure data exchange in protected team rooms.
For a complete search solution with the power of information pairing, check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, February 27, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
JackBe: Data Fusion
January 17, 2012
Founded in 2002 by brothers Luis and Jacob Derechin, JackBe was originally an AJAX widget company. At the demand of its customers, the company centered its product offering around an enterprise mashup server that supports the user-driven ad-hoc integration of data. The company was cited as a “Next-Gen BI” technology by Forrester Research, Inc. in its March 2011 “Trends 2011 And Beyond: Business Intelligence” report.
JackBe’s real-time business intelligence platform, Presto, allows users to combine data from any enterprise application, as well as data from the cloud to compose apps and dashboards that are publishable to portals, the web, spreadsheets, and mobile devices. The platform is organized around Presto Hub, which provides a single point of sign-on for JackBe’s mashup development editors, governance tools for administrators, and application storefront.
The company’s Presto Enterprise Mashup Server provides service virtualization that solves business problems and allows users and developers secure and consolidated access to disparate data from internal services, external services, and application databases. Presto Mashup Composers and Presto Mashup Connectors feature tools that enable business and technical users to create mashups. JackBe also offers Transparency 2.0, a solution for data feeds and data widgets for state and local government’s citizen-facing websites, and Mashup Sites for SharePoint, an intelligence solution that provides SharePoint 2007/2010 business users with real-time visual web-part-based apps and interactive dashboards.
To help users store, organize, and share mashups and apps, JackBe developed an app store framework in the third iteration of Presto. The apps are portable and can feed data into Excel and run standalone, on dashboards, on mobile devices, or in SharePoint.
Customers include the US Air Force, the US Army, NASA, Elsevier, Random House, Qualcom, GE Energy, and Accenture and illustrate the broad appeal of the platform. Competitors include Zapatec, IBM, and mashup tools provided by online service providers such as Google and Yahoo.
One observation: Our efforts to contact the company have been routinely ignored or pushed to a telemarketer. Your mileage may vary.
Rita Safranek, January 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search-Driven Web Content
December 14, 2011
Web content management deserves attention and planning when evaluating your company’s online business model. William Saville at CMS Wire discusses all the angles that need to be evaluated in, “SharePoint 2010 As a Web Delivery Platform.” Search-based experiences are becoming more valuable in the overall online experience. Users want to quickly find the content that is relevant to them, without wading through irrelevant hits.
Everyone is talking about search-driven experiences that enable easier discovery of content and make content personal and relevant to the end user. The business case is quite simple. The quicker people can find what they are looking for on a website, the more likely they are to engage and take an interest one step further. Using the search technology that is baked into SharePoint, as well as FAST search (which can be implemented on top of SharePoint), it is possible to provide end users with powerful search-based experiences.
We think this is one area in particular where a third-party alternative to SharePoint excels, specifically Fabasoft Mindbreeze. The Austrian-based company offers a suite of solutions that serve as alternatives to SharePoint or work alongside a SharePoint installation, improving its performance. Its InSite product adds meaning to website search.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is our product to empower websites with professional high-end search cababilities. We offer InSite as a Cloud service and for on premise installation. Today, I would like to show how you can adapt the search-experience by defining views. Views allow you to group search results by search queries. It’s a really great and simple concept and you can adapt your search results without any need for server configuration. The following 5 scenarios should get you started on the topic . . .
The Mindbreeze InSite solution offers metadata, filters, grouping by product, and content-based views to name a few options. The search is intuitive and results are relevant and fast. See if InSite might be a beneficial addition to your online business model.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Enterprise Search in the Realm of Social Media
December 13, 2011
Enterprise and social media are two emerging trends gaining ground fast in the world of IT, but how do they work together? Not just fads, they have proven their worth and are here to stay, but how can they both be utilized in order to maximize efficiency? SharePoint is an obvious place to start, as it controls a large segment of the market. Rich Blank gives the pros and cons in, “5 Myths about SharePoint as an Enterprise Social Platform.”
When SharePoint 2010 arrived in the marketplace, the platform included new social capabilities to improve productivity and collaboration. However, as the consumer social web exploded, it became clear that the 2010 platform only provided the basic building blocks of social computing. As many organizations are now making social collaboration a priority, it’s important to dispel myths and provide a reality-based understanding of SharePoint 2010 as a social computing platform.
While SharePoint works as an enterprise foundation, its true potential comes through the addition of third party solutions. A solution that we like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Fabasoft has taken an interest in social media, and is working to maximize its offerings to compliment social media needs.
Here Michael Hadrian discusses their participation in the Content and Collaboration Summit in London:
’With Folio Cloud, Fabasoft has developed a European Cloud for ECM and B2B collaboration. This enables worldwide connected collaboration and secure data exchange in protected team rooms,’ explained Michael Hadrian, Fabasoft Distribution GmbH managing director. ‘As Premier Sponsor at this established conference, we are looking forward to contributing towards the continued advancement and assertion of business Cloud applications.’ In his presentation, Michael Hadrian presented Fabasoft’s latest inter-company business applications live, showing which concrete business advantages companies can benefit from with Fabasoft Folio Cloud based on customer projects.
While there is not yet a single out-of-the-box solution for organizations needing to merge their enterprise and social media needs, there are good solutions out there. Check out the Mindbreeze suite of offerings to see if it might work for you.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Optimizing Your Enterprise Mobile Strategy
December 12, 2011
Two main concerns need to be balanced when pursuing an effective mobile strategy for any organization: efficiency and security. CMS Wire reports in, “Mobile Risks and Opportunities: Is Your Company’s Strategy Optimized?”
“A balance needs to be struck so that the organization can take advantage of the new technology, but not at the cost of lost confidential information or an IT infrastructure that is unmanageable. How can IT be expected to support five versions of essentially the same application but from different vendors (not all of which may be in business next year), running on every imaginable mobile device and operating system — that everybody wants connected to the corporate network?”
Add the necessity for mobile enterprise to the equation to further complicate the challenge. Mobile changes can occur so rapidly that a plan needs to be in place in order to keep pace. But keeping pace without regard to security poses its own threat.
“The internal audit, risk management and IT security teams should provide advice on the risks. However, care should be taken that excessive concern about risks does not result in being slow, or even late, to seize the opportunities.”
Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers a mobility solution that ensures security and efficiency are both priorities. Unlike broader solutions like SharePoint, you never have to worry about access and security issues with Mindbreeze.
“Smartphones and tablets allow you to act quickly in business matters – an invaluable competitive advantage. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Mobile makes company knowledge available on all mobile devices. You can act freely, independently and yet always securely. Irrespective of what format the data is in. Full functionality: Search results are displayed homogenously to the web client with regards to clear design and intuitive navigation.”
Change will always be a challenge in IT, but success is possible through anticipating the threat and responding with a smart solution. We think Fabasoft Mindbreeze is worth a second look for this, and many other reasons.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 12, 2011
Sponsored by: Pandia.com
Endeca Deal Ups Ante in Oracle Fight with HP
October 19, 2011
Today American computer technology corporation Oracle entered into an agreement to purchase Endeca Technologies, a Cambridge MA vendor of software for unstructured data analytics and business intelligence for an undisclosed sum.
Who cares about this deal? Hewlett Packard to name one company. Other organizations will see this as a little known software company which has been absorbed by a far larger database and enterprise software firm. Search is now a bit like Norton Utilities, an add in.
After the deal closes, Oracle allegedly will create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together enabling businesses to make stronger and more profitable decisions.According to the Computer World article, “Oracle Boosts Enterprise Search with Endeca Purchase” Oracle said in a statement:
The purchase will allow Oracle to offer a range of technologies that will help enterprises process, store, search and analyze both structured and unstructured data in an integrated fashion.
Despite the range of customers and products that Endeca brings to the table, we suspect that the amount Oracle paid is probably hefty. Endeca has ingested more than $70 million since the late 1990s. Stephen E Arnold, author of The New Landscape of Search, told me:
Endeca tried to pull off an IPO several years ago. That did not take place. Endeca then raised additional money from Intel and SAP’s venture unit. Endeca was not able to generate the type of revenue Autonomy had achieved. Oracle’s purchase of Endeca complements or complicates the firm’s search and content processing cost situation. Now Oracle has the aging Oracle Text, the somewhat inefficient Secure Enterprise Search 11g system, the InQuira natural language processing system, the TripleHop tagging systems, and the Endeca Guided Navigation system. One thing is certain: consulting and engineering services will be required to herd these different technologies forward in a cohesive manner. Like Hewlett Packard, Oracle may be betting on big companies with an appetite for expensive engineering to make the deal pay, regardless of the price Oracle paid for Endeca. With Microsoft bundling Fast Search with some SharePoint licenses, Oracle’s desire for a high margin, no brainer upsell may be tough to achieve.
We foresee three primary challenges in Oracle’s future:-
- Avoiding the high cost base of supporting and enhancing quite different search technologies. This is a strategy that Autonomy was able to implement, but enterprise software vendor OpenText has not yet been able to make work at Autonomy’s scale.
- Fighting successfully against HP and Autonomy for services revenue in a market where search is a commodity and becoming a component in a larger software system. Exalead has implemented this strategy effectively. Now Oracle and HP will have to differentiate their offerings and maintain margins and fees for search solutions decline. Autonomy has outperformed Endeca for many years in both management acumen and revenue production.
- Finding a way to keep costs under control. Search is an expensive proposition, and Oracle will have to do more than get a Fortune 500 firm to sign on for Endeca’s solution. Oracle will have to boost margins, implement Endeca’s consultative approach to search, and invest in Endeca’s eCommerce, business intelligence, and unstructured data technology. eCommerce may be a tough challenge due to the increasing interest in open source solutions such as eBay’s acquisition of Magenta.
Our question: Who will emerge to challenge Dassault Exalead in search based applications? IBM OmniFind and Watson, an open source vendor, one of the many newcomers to search? Will Endeca’s MBA style approach to consultative engineering pay dividends to Oracle, a company with some US Marines type qualities? Culture shock, anyone?
Stay tuned.
Jasmine Ashton, October 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Lucid Imagination: Open Source Search Reaches for Big Data
September 30, 2011
We are wrapping up a report about the challenges “big data” pose to organizations. Perhaps the most interesting outcome of our research is that there are very few search and content processing systems which can cope with the digital information required by some organizations. Three examples merit listing before I comment on open source search and “big data”.
The first example is the challenge of filtering information required by orgnaizatio0ns produced within the organization and by the organizations staff, contractors, and advisors. We learned in the course of our investigation that the promises of processing updates to Web pages, price lists, contracts, sales and marketing collateral, and other routine information are largely unmet. One of the problems is that the disparate content types have different update and change cycles. The most widely used content management system based on our research results is SharePoint, and SharePoint is not able to deliver a comprehensive listing of content without significant latency. Fixes are available but these are engineering tasks which consume resources. Cloud solutions do not fare much better, once again due to latency. The bottom line is that for information produced within an organization employees are mostly unable to locate information without a manual double check. Latency is the problem. We did identify one system which delivered documented latency across disparate content types of 10 to 15 minutes. The solution is available from Exalead, but the other vendors’ systems were not able to match this problem of putting fresh, timely information produced within an organization in front of system users. Shocked? We were.
Reducing latency in search and content processing systems is a major challenge. Vendors often lack the resources required to solve a “hard problem” so “easy problems” are positioned as the key to improving information access. Is latency a popular topic? A few vendors do address the issue; for example, Digital Reasoning and Exalead.
Second, when organizations tap into content produced by third parties, the latency problem becomes more severe. There is the issue of the inefficiency and scaling of frequent index updates. But the larger problem is that once an organization “goes outside” for information, additional variables are introduced. In order to process the broad range of content available from publicly accessible Web sites or the specialized file types used by certain third party content producers, connectors become a factor. Most search vendors obtain connectors from third parties. These work pretty much as advertised for common file types such as Lotus Notes. However, when one of the targeted Web sites such as a commercial news services or a third-party research firm makes a change, the content acquisition system cannot acquire content until the connectors are “fixed”. No problem as long as the company needing the information is prepared to wait. In my experience, broken connectors mean another variable. Again, no problem unless critical information needed to close a deal is overlooked.
Search: An Information Retrieval Fukushima?
May 18, 2011
Information about the scale of the horrific nuclear disaster in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex is now becoming more widely known.
Expertise and Smoothing
My interest in the event is the engineering of a necklace of old-style reactors and the problems the LOCA (loss of coolant accident) triggered. The nagging thought I had was that today’s nuclear engineers understood the issues with the reactor design, the placement of the spent fuel pool, and the risks posed by an earthquake. After my years in the nuclear industry, I am quite confident that engineers articulated these issues. However, the technical information gets “smoothed” and simplified. The complexities of nuclear power generation are well known at least in engineering schools. The nuclear engineers are often viewed as odd ducks by the civil engineers and mechanical engineers. A nuclear engineer has to do the regular engineering stuff of calculating loads and looking up data in hefty tomes. But the nukes need grounding in chemistry, physics, and math, lots of math. Then the engineer who wants to become a certified, professional nuclear engineer has some other hoops to jump through. I won’t bore you with the details, but the end result of the process produces people who can explain clearly a particular process and its impacts.
Does your search experience emit signs of troubles within?
The problem is that art history majors, journalists, failed Web masters, and even Harvard and Wharton MBAs get bored quickly. The details of a particular nuclear process makes zero sense to someone more comfortable commenting about the color of Mona Lisa’s gown. So “smoothing” takes place. The ridges and outcrops of scientific and statistical knowledge get simplified. Once a complex situation has been smoothed, the need for hard expertise is diminished. With these simplifications, the liberal arts crowd can “reason” about risks, costs, upsides, and downsides.
A nuclear fall out map. The effect of a search meltdown extends far beyond the boundaries of a single user’s actions. Flawed search and retrieval has major consequences, many of which cannot be predicted with high confidence.
Everything works in an acceptable or okay manner until there is a LOCA or some other problem like a stuck valve or a crack in a pipe in a radioactive area of the reactor. Quickly the complexities, risks, and costs of the “smoothed problem” reveal the fissures and crags of reality.
Web search and enterprise search are now experiencing what I call a Fukushima event. After years of contentment with finding information, suddenly the dashboards are blinking yellow and red. Users are unable to find the information needed to do their job or something as basic as locate a colleague’s telephone number or office location. I have separated Web search and enterprise search in my professional work.
I want to depart for a moment and consider the two “species” of search as a single process before the ideas slip away from me. I know that Web search processes publicly accessible content, has the luxury of ignoring servers with high latency, and filtering content to create an index that meets the vendors’ needs, not the users’ needs. I know that enterprise search must handle diverse content types, must cope with security and access controls, and perform more functions that one of those two inch wide Swiss Army knives on sale at the airport in Geneva. I understand. My concern is broader is this write up. Please, bear with me.
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