InQuira Uses Serena Software
November 24, 2009
InQuira, a natural language search system vendor, uses the Serena Software On Demand service. You can get the details in “Serena Software Makes Agile On Demand Product Free.” InQuira began using Agile On Demand in March of 2009 to help adopt Agile development across it’s development organization. The company tested Serena with a very small group of developers and immediately saw the time, resource and cost benefits of Agile On Demand. Within 3 months, their entire 50 person development team adopted Agile and began using the product.
Serena is a privately owned company, headquartered in Redwood City, California, with 29 offices in 14 countries. Serena provides software to over 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100. Serena helps customers lower costs by standardizing and automating development processes across both mainframe and distributed environments. More information about Serena is available at http://www.serena.com.
I found the item interesting because search vendors do not usually reveal the software and systems used to create their products.
Stephen Arnold, November 24, 2009
I think the Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Administration needs to know that I was not paid to write about this programming tool that keeps herding the InQuira programming doggies along.
Microsoft and News Corp.: A Tag Team of Giants Will Challenge Google
November 23, 2009
Government regulators are powerless when it comes to online. The best bet, in my opinion, is for large online companies to act as if litigation and regulator hand holding was a cost of doing business. While the legal eagles flap and the regulators meet bright, chipper people, the business of online moves forward.
The news that News Corp. and Microsoft are, according to “Microsoft Offers To Pay News Corp To “De-List” Itself From Google”, and other “experts”, these two giants want to form a digital World Wrestling Federation tag team. In the “fights” to come, these champions—Steve Ballmer and Rupert Murdoch–will take on the unlikely upstarts, Sergey the Algorithm Guy and Larry the Math Whiz.
Which of these two tag teams will grace the cover of the WWF marketing collateral? What will their personas become? Source: http://www.x-entertainment.com/pics5/wwe11click.jpg
The idea is to “pull” News Corp. content from Google or make it pay through its snout for the right to index News Corp. content. The deal will probably encompass any News Corp. content. Whatever Google deal is in place with News Corp. would be reworked. News Corp., like other traditional media companies is struggling to regain its revenue traction.
For Microsoft a new wrestling partner makes sense. Bing is gaining market share, but at the expense of Yahoo’s search share. Microsoft now faces Google’s 1,001 tiny cuts. The most recent is the browser based operating system. There is the problem of developers with Microsoft’s former employees rallying the Google faithful. There’s the pesky Android phone thing that went from a joke to a coalition of telephone-centric outfits. There’s the annoyance of Google in the US government. On and on. No one Google nick has to kill Microsoft. Nope. Google just needs to let a trickle of revenue slip away from the veins of Microsoft. The company’s rising blood pressure will do the rest. Eventually, the losses from the 1,001 tiny cuts will force the $70 billion Redmond wrestler to take a break. That “rest” may be what gives Google the opportunity to do significant damage with its as-yet-unappreciated play for the TV, cable, and independent motion picture business. Silverlight 4.0 may not be enough to overcome the structural changes in rich media. That’s real money. Almost as much as the telephony play promises to deliver to the somewhat low key team of Sergey the Algorithm Guy and Larry the Math Whiz
Sergey the Algorithm Guy and Larry the Math Whiz take a break from discussing the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test of normality. Training is tough for this duo. Long hours of solitary computation may exhaust the team before it tackles the Ballmer-Murdoch duo, which may be the most dangerous opponent the Math Guys have faced.
I look forward to the fight promoter to pull out all the stops. One of the Buffers will be the announcer. The cut man will be the master, Stitch Duran. The venue will be Las Vegas, followed by other world capitals of money, power, and citizen concern.
Nicholas Carlson reported:
Still, if News Corp were to “de-list” from Google, we’d expect to see all kinds of ads touting Bing as the only place to find the Wall Street Journal and MySpace pages online. Maybe that’d swing search engine share some, but we doubt it.
SEO Tool Run Down
November 23, 2009
Hope springs eternal in the Webmaster’s breast. The Google keeps fiddling with its relevance ranking and causing those who depend on Google traffic to struggle with caffeine induced headaches. For readers who worry about their Google rank, you will want to navigate to “SEO Search Tools You Should Not Live Without”. There are useful links for:
- Keyword research tools
- Site check tools
- Link tools
- Ranking tools
- Analytics tools.
If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the SEO. My apologies to Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Stephen Arnold, November 23, 2009
I wish to disclose to the US Coast Guard that I was not paid to write about SEO or denigrate the writer’s use of the word “sea”.
Google and Infoserve
November 23, 2009
Short honk: In my new video series, “How to Make Money with Google,” I mention the risks of working with Google. In the partnering video that will be released on November 25, 2009, I point out that Google can change direction without much warning. A good example of this characteristic for one-sided action appears in “Google Blow for Infoserv”. Infoserve will not be a Google partner for much longer. If the write up is accurate, Infoserve will have to work to generate revenue growth. The divorce has had a somewhat downward trending financial impact on Infoserve.
Stephen Arnold, November 23, 2009
Securities House, oyez. No one paid me to write this pointer to a case example of Googzilla’s power.
Nstein Releases Semantic Site Search
November 23, 2009
Nstein, a company that offers a wide range of software systems, has released its 3S product. Details appear in “Nstein Technologies Releases Semantic Site Search Engine.” The story reported:
The 3S product is built utilizing the registered text-extracting expertise of Nstein for web site search and precise results.
I was initially confused by the 3S moniker. But the write up shed more light on the approach:
3S’s design allows it to source the search content from various stored indexes and published web sources. It works by sensing the attributes of the materials to index them in an orderly fashion. After arranging the materials, Nstein’s patented semantic fortification method is utilized for processing.
According to the article, Nstein’s first client is Gesca Digital, which is part of the Torstar-owned Olive network. Gesca focuses on French language content. I anticipate that the system will become available on www.cyberpresse.ca and www.testesaclaques.tv. I’ve added these sites to my “to review” list.
Stephen Arnold, November 23, 2009
I want to disclose to the Maritime Administration that I was not paid to write about a company near the Great Lakes. No cross border shenanigans for the goose.
Newspaper Circulation Woes
November 23, 2009
I find that I am spending less and less time with the Sunday newspapers. I subscribe to the Courier Journal (I used to work there) and the New York Times (I did some projects for this outfit years ago). I suppose that is the sentimental side of the addled goose. This morning I flipped through both papers and watched number one son and founder of Adhere Solutions read a couple of stories on the sports page. We talked about the “old news” in both papers. He went for a run, and I rode my bike. On the way out the door, we dumped the papers in the recycle bin. Another Sunday with newspapers becoming less and less useful to a couple of wired dudes, one old and one considerably younger.
I urge you to read this AP story by craft master Michael Liedtke, who certainly has a stake in the health of traditional publishing. His article “Newspaper Circulation May Be Worse than It Looks” is probably old news to newspaper mavens and sort of obvious to me. The addled goose is terrified of the AP, so I won’t quote from the scintillating write up. Without a quote to anchor my remarks, I know that my seventh grade teacher (may she rest in peace) would have hit me on the head with her ruler. But quoting is one quick way to get into a fair use squabble. The goose is too old, tired, and jaded to want to get tangled in that thorn bush.
The point of the write up is that after a romp through circulation data, the newspapers in the sample are not having banner years. There were lots of reasons, but none of them nailed the core problem in my opinion. The children of the newspaper industry executives and pundits are the reason. The demographic shift finds that mummy and daddy produce information in a way that is not what the Trents and Whitneys want.
Mr. Liedtke wrote a long article, stuffed with data, and explained everything except the obvious. The traditional media are like the Babylonian cuneiform crowd when sheepskin caught fire among the scribes. Times changes. Needs evolve. Kids ignore mummy and daddy.
Stephen Arnold, November 23, 2009
I want to report to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing that I was not paid to point out that children want information in a relevant medium. Oh, while I have the Bureau’s attention, the quality of the $5 bills seems to be deteriorating. The DC subway ticket machine could not read the three fives I had with me. I suppose these machines are like some of the kids who are reading averse.
Ixiasoft Crafts New Partnership
November 23, 2009
XML repository technology continues to intersect with traditional search and content processing systems. I was reading a news item about Ixiasoft’s deal with an outfit unfamiliar to me when I got a call from a person looking for information about XML. I thought XML was like a circus pony: understood and relatively easy to handle once the equine was shaped to meet the trainer’s expectations.
Ixiasoft’s new dance partner is XML-INTL. The idea is to offer licensees the ability to localize and translate content in the Ixiasoft system. The article “Ixiasoft Announces Strategic Partnership with XML-INTL to Streamline Global Content Delivery” provides this description of the tie up:
By integrating the IXIASOFT DITACMS with the XML-INTL XTM Suite, IXIASOFT customers will benefit from a fully integrated translation management suite which will further enhance their control over the localization process. The DITA CMS is a content management system aimed at technical communicators for the efficient authoring, management and publishing of DITA-based technical documentation. XML-INTL is the developer of the XMT Suite, a leading translation set of tools. The tight integration between the two offerings will allow users to seamless move their content from the CMS to the translation management tools and always have access to updated localized content. As a result, organizations will be able to maximize their reuse strategy and continue to drive down localization costs. Organizations are feeling the pressures of globalization and one of their main challenges is to produce localized product documentation that is consistent, on-time and on-budget. Combined to the DITA CMS system, the XTM Suite will facilitate this process, resulting in direct cost savings and shorter localization cycles.
Ixiasoft has a number of partners. You can find a list here. Some of the tie ups were surprising; for example, nStein, a company also in a similar business. Others struck me as interesting because I was not aware of these hooks; for example, Ektron and Stellent. The company lists almost two dozen resellers for its software and systems.
Ixiasoft is a vendor of XML content management software. One of the company’s products is the TEXTML Server, a native XML database and search engine used to store, index and retrieve large volumes of XML content. he firm sells the DITA CMS, which is designed to author, manage, review, localize and publish DITA-based technical documentation. The company provides a white paper, but you have to go through a registration process. My dog is the proud possessor of this document because he is the vice president of his tech firm and needs this information. I think he is looking forward to a sales call because Ixiasoft wanted his phone number.
The company’s most recent release of the DITA CMS product includes a number of enhancements. These range from a new interface for its native search functions to a more functional table editor. I had in my files the article “Modulo Using Ixiasoft XML Technology”, which is a basic description of how one information company uses the firm’s TextML Server product.
The company is based in Montréal, Québec, and is privately held. The firm lists some of its customers here. I try to steer clear of anything that includes the acronym CMS. That’s a field fraught with litigation, confusion, azure chip consultants, failed projects, and cost overruns. Every once in a while a rose will boom, but in most cases CMS reminds me of Flanders fields where the crosses stand “row on row,” CMS implementation managers dead projects.
Stephen Arnold, November 23, 2009
The Government Printing Office is hereby notified that I was not paid to write this article with its opinions about content management. No compensation but I did include a poetic metaphor in honor of Lt. Col. John McCrae.
France Begins to See Google as a Nation State
November 22, 2009
“The Digitalization of Literary Works: Is Google above the Law” is one of those articles that reveals how far out of touch journalists and Google pundits who talk about the Google Foosball tables and the Google stacks of snacks. Google is 11 years old and has meticulously documented exactly what it has built and what that infrastructure’s capabilities are. Google, in my opinion, figures that if a person is too lazy to read a technical paper, why should Google “connect the dots” for anyone.
The French daily l’Humanité seems to be on a more fruitful path than the folks who explain that Chrome is really not new or that it is no match for Windows 7 or Mac OSX. Whatever. Google is now packaging innovations that are in some cases seven or eight years old. Chrome is being productized to further waterboard Steve Ballmer. I am tired of explaining this misperception about Google. Read my monographs. You won’t learn how those wild and crazy guys figured out “search” from me.
The big news in this story is that Google “gets its hands on Lyon’s public library.” (I thought that another vendor “had its hands on” the Lyon library, but as most Google competitors learn, Google doesn’t have hands. Google is an environment and one day folks at a place like the Lyon public library say, “Hey, we’re Googley.” Believe me, vendors have a tough time selling against an outfit that doesn’t return phone calls or try particularly hard to win accounts. Most Googlers are blissfully clueless about “traditional sales methods” by virtue of Google’s wacky hiring process.
l’Humanité reported:
There is a precedent in France: the City of Lyon signed an agreement with Google in 2008. Over the last few months Lyon’s public library, the second largest in France, has given several interviews. In the columns of Le Monde, the library’s manager indicated that the contract signed with Google extended over several years, and on France 2 (French national television network) put the cost at €60 million, or €120 per title. This information comes as a surprise given that the amount is two or three times higher than that announced two years ago by the president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Furthermore, according to a report from Lyon city council, the contract with Google is set to run for…..twenty-five years! The same mystery surrounds the benefits accorded to the Californian giant, which claims it merely wants to transmit culture! The aforementioned report stipulates that Google will have full ownership of the digital books.
Okay, so people in France don’t know what deal Lyon cut with the Google. Then the article revealed:
In order to find out the truth, we asked Lyon city hall for the documents pertaining to the deal concluded with Google, documents which should normally be public. And surprise, surprise, they refused to communicate this information. We also posed several questions to Google France, in particular concerning the number of French titles available on Google Books. The response was negative! Google claims not to know how many books are in French!
The capstone of the write up appears in this passage:
the Californian company has announced that the location of the centre responsible for digitizing books from Lyon’s library is a secret! Anyone would think we were in a James Bond film! This refusal is, however, legal. That of Lyon’s city hall poses a more serious question. According to city hall, a clause was signed forbidding them from giving access to the contract documents signed with Google. They even refuse to reveal information that the Commission for Access to Administrative Documents has stated can be communicated without reserve!
Dealings between diplomats from France and Germany in World War One were less convoluted. In my opinion, France is realizing that Google operates like a country, not a company. See how far off the mark the “Sergey and Larry eat pizza” analyses are.
Check out those Google technical papers. The Google is quite an interesting company and it just now making public accessible technology that is quite old. The question is, “What’s Google working on now?” The betas are like looking at Google in a rear view mirror of a car speeding away from the Googleplex.
Stephen Arnold, November 22, 2009
Double Dip Recession and Enterprise Search
November 22, 2009
I loathe economists. The discipline is a weird game where words have to be learned so those in the know can talk about events beyond the reach of “models”. I listen to one economics podcast from George Mason University each week in order to keep myself awake. When I listen to the analyses, my adrenaline surges, and I am good to go for another four or five hours of work. I just get revved and ready like people who reacted to the Nixon campaign joke “Tan, rested, ready. Nixon in 68”.
I did find The Market Oracle’s “The Pending Financial, Economic, Political, and Social Collapse of the United States” timely. I was faced with dozens of broken escalators in Washington, DC last week, a multi hour delay when the air traffic control system “lost” aircraft, a MARC commuter train that was able to travel at 10 miles per hour, and one teleconference participant who missed a meeting due to a violent student protest over a tuition price increase. I am not sure how your week progressed, but I think that these are useful snapshots of life in late 2009.
The key point in The Market Oracle’s write up struck me as this one:
We need to start thinking about where we live and how we will survive an economic collapse. When the federal government can no longer function, what will we do to replace it? How are individuals to survive when essential goods and services become extinct? This isn’t a future scenario that will happen twenty or thirty years from now, no! We are already experiencing it.
Big ideas are not what capture my attention. I think about the impact of these types of statements in terms of enterprise search. Here’s what I see for 2010. Please, keep in mind that these are my opinions. If you don’t want to read them, navigate away from this page now. Honk!
- A number of search and content processing companies are going to go out of business. It pains me to point out that companies with interesting technology like Siderean Software are on what seems like permanent “hold”. Other companies like Grokker which have moved from utility to search to content aggregator have pulled in their claws. Unless additional funding is found, 2010 will be a tough one for search and content processing. After all, the advertising and marketing consultants need only a handful of vendors pushing “semantic thermometers” and “blog pulse trackers”.
- The industry leaders in search are going to chase other types of software services. I can see the trend now in Autonomy’s steady push into information sectors where search is important, but search is just one patch in a patchwork quilt of functions. Some of the vendors trying to use search as the foundation of enterprise software are going to find that making big dollar sales is expensive and time consuming. The technology may be fine, but the rigors of sales and marketing may exhaust the firm’s resources.
- The battle between Google and Microsoft is going to disrupt some organizations and create the equivalent of political warfare in the Dark Ages. I don’t see any way to bring rationality to the exchanges between the Google factions and the Microsoft factions. The financial impact of this battle will be some really great deals. The vendors are going to want lock in, and the repercussions will be important for years in an organization that jumps one way or another. Fence sitting might not look too bad for some organizations?
- Open source is following in the path of commercial software in the PC industry. I am all for open source, but the business models of the open source companies are not that different from the business models of the “old” IBM and Unisys type companies. The goal is to bill for services and anything else that can be added to the invoice. Success is increased billings. When I mention this trajectory to the open source champions, I get the type of look when I did one year of graduate work at a Jesuit university. Reality can be different from the facade in life and in open source.
- The “cloud of unknowing” about information access will become darker. In the last six months, I have been struck by the failure of organizations to learn basic lessons about search and content processing. I think part of the reason is the questionable marketing approaches taken by some 20 somethings. But a big part of the problem is that people in organizations responsible for search have not done their homework. Change is a repetition of the same old process that created problems on the last search procurement go round. Is it laziness? Indifference? I don’t know.
- Google is not seen or perceived in a way that is strategically useful. Google itself is a master of information and I don’t see the firm changing any time soon. This means that those who look at Google have to figure out why products like Chrome get so much attention and Google’s push into vertical rich media services and video conferencing gets so little. The phone companies provide ample evidence that their managers did not understand Google’s impact in telephony until it was, in my opinion, too late.
The double dip recession and the emergent third world environment in the US, if The Market Oracle is correct, sets the stage for an interesting thought: Is Google the revolution? The company might just be the next big, political thing. In the country of Google, what’s the role of Microsoft or other search and content processing vendors?
Stephen Arnold, November 22, 2009
I want to disclose the US Chamber of Commerce, a fine oversight entity, that I was not paid to write this opinion about the new country of Google. Who would pay me to write about Google as a country when it is so much more comforting to think about Sergey and Larry, eating a pizza, and learning about Cuba.
Microsoft Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
November 22, 2009
Short honk: If you have not downloaded Microsoft Fast 2010, you can do so at http://ow.ly/DH7M. I don’t know how long this link will be live. You must register to download the files. The first step will be to download and install the SharePoint Server 2010 beta. You may want to take a peek at the instructions here before launching the installation. A tip—When you try to print XPS files, we have better luck viewing the XPS documents within Internet Explorer 8.x. You can then print with fewer hassles from that application. Enjoy! Remember: ease of use, high performance, and bells and whistles that once cost $250,000 and up are yours for SharePoint 2010. A good test would be to get a Google Search Appliance and this Microsoft Fast 2010 package. Get two engineers and tell each to “Go”. Keep track of the time required to install, debug, and deploy the test index to one person. Which is better, faster, cheaper?
Some potentially useful related links are:
- Planning and Architecture for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (Beta)
- FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Windows PowerShell Cmdlets Overview (Beta)
- Site Admin and Central Admin for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (Beta)
- Monitoring for FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint (Beta)
- Search Technologies for SharePoint 2010 Products
The main Microsoft page for enterprise search ping my watcher with the fact that some changes were made. You can explore this splash page which features lots of uses of the word “fast” here. A quick check of the list of add ons reveals that most of the “old” Fast features are now listed. I wonder if some of the more interesting ones have been rewritter? Let me know if this is a cosmetics play or an engineering rebuild. (I hope for the latter.)
Have fun.
Stephen Arnold, November 22, 2009
I want to disclose to the US Department of Education that I was neither paid nor given special instruction to write this news item. However, you may want to make sure your knowledge of scripting is on the above average side before you get too frisky with Microsoft Fast 2010, the SharePoint edition.
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